Why would this part be tricky? This was working in HoI2 for air, land AND naval battles flawlessly...
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Almost all of you are looking at HoI3 with HoI2 glasses on. I admit it is hard to avoid.
However, long battles was not the end all answer, which was why WiF and TRP and the like got to be so ridiculously unrealistic in combat. All they did was to increase the defense of all units and tweak some db/misc files. It turned into such a mess at times, with hundreds of divisions in a single province and aircraft being decimated on the attack due to armageddon's increased damage algorithm. It was not fun for me anyway.
In HoI3, the battles take place on a smaller scale, as well as on a more numerous basis. Long battles may take place if the sides are evenly matched, especially in leadership...which will often determine reinforcements from the reserve. Also, province battles will perhaps only include 5 divisions at a time from each side at any one time. This will mean that the battle must be paid close attention to and the composition will be important. There is also a more random factor to the battles, a measure of unpredictability, that will keep players on their toes.
F--king with the engine to automatically make battles take longer for the sake of Stalingrad is making the same unbalanced mistake that WiF and TRP made.
However, long battles was not the end all answer, which was why WiF and TRP and the like got to be so ridiculously unrealistic in combat. All they did was to increase the defense of all units and tweak some db/misc files. It turned into such a mess at times, with hundreds of divisions in a single province and aircraft being decimated on the attack due to armageddon's increased damage algorithm. It was not fun for me anyway.
In HoI3, the battles take place on a smaller scale, as well as on a more numerous basis. Long battles may take place if the sides are evenly matched, especially in leadership...which will often determine reinforcements from the reserve. Also, province battles will perhaps only include 5 divisions at a time from each side at any one time. This will mean that the battle must be paid close attention to and the composition will be important. There is also a more random factor to the battles, a measure of unpredictability, that will keep players on their toes.
F--king with the engine to automatically make battles take longer for the sake of Stalingrad is making the same unbalanced mistake that WiF and TRP made.
Sake of Stalingrad?
There were plenty of sieges and long-term battles of attrition during WWII.
Battles of annihilating pockets, assaulting cities and general fortification fights generally lasted a LONG time if assaulted in the wrong way. It took the Allies months to get around the Siegfried line, simply because of the fear of such a battle.
The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the Siege of Leningrad, Monte Cassino, the Italian fortification lines, the battle for Papua (depicted in HoI2 as the fight over one province, the Owen Stanley Mountains), battles for Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and the Philippines, as well as the Burmese campaign - all were extremely bloody and long-lasting battles which all, in their own way, had a massive impact on WWII.
While it is nothing like World War I's meat grinder, WWII had its own way of adding to the death - these battles, while not on the scale of the Western Front, consumed huge numbers of lives.
There needs to be potential for a grinder - it just needs to be lodged in reality. Armour would not grind against infantry on an open plain unless the infantry had Maginot-style fortifications. Airborne troops waiting for reinforcement will hunker down and defend every inch - in the words of many, especially following Bastogne, "We're airborne! We're meant to be surrounded!". Mountain troops should be the same.
And remember, HoI3 won't have the mass stacks of HoI2 - thus helping the sense of a battle across multiple provinces.
Scratch Tarawa please.
Bloody? yes.
Siege or long-lasting? no way.
Also remember what a siege is, the point of a siege is to NOT battle but to starve or force the enemy into submission. In a siege the attacker takes low casualties, represented in HoI2/3 by no battle or movement going on except for perhaps airstrikes.
What about making it an event? When the enemy is so locked into a position you can have a mission called "Hold at all costs" thus putting a gamble on holding the place (in which victory = +dissent whilst defeat = -dissent) then if the attacker can't break within a month turns into an epic battle?
Also, I'm also advocating for an easier log to go for so that AAR would be easier to do and more common place.
Also, I'm also advocating for an easier log to go for so that AAR would be easier to do and more common place.
Well in HoI2 terms it's kind of long, and i believe that is the point.
I think your missing the point of the original poster. I don't think you should have to have an specific order for static divisions at the front lines for 'aggressively shell the bejeezus out them every day at noon' or 'relax and sip lemonade for now'
. There should be a level of not only attrition to static divisions at the front lines (perhaps tied in with leadership qualities i.e. aggressive vs cautious) from H&I shelling, sniping and small unit patrols and probes. Another aspect that would determine attrition is the experience level of the divisions facing each other. An experienced division would gain smaller incremental amounts of experience in a static envirionment, but a green division would gain alot at the expense of higher casualties through enemy fire and stress. There should also be some increase in intelligence. This would be through taking prisoners on patrols, and in some cases defections (which were quite common on the Eastern Front, especially early in the war) The longer a couple divisions faced off, the more intel you would be able to garner this way of not only which unit it was, but also what was going on around it.
Over a really, really long battle period? One that went on for say, several weeks? We didn't see any battles of that duration - at least I didn't. That was what the OP was speaking of, and what I was asking about. Can the system be set up to demonstrate a battle of what is essentially stalemate, where the battle rages on, units toe-to-toe, unresolved for a long time?
To be honest, I'm less concerned with the reinforcement side than I am with the battle's duration.
If frontage could be made low in certain areas, and terrain modifiers handicapped both sides in certain ways of course this could be done. It all remains to be seen if there will be a realistic combat model.
I had such a situation attacking Gibraltar, I had to manualy take units out of the battle and put new ones into the battle. I did this whenever a units org got too low, as soon as it was high enough again I put it into the attack again.
WiF overdid it in my opinion since you got to the stage that several 1918 Polish Inf could stop 1939 Medium Armour Divs from breaking through.