Hearts of Iron IV - 45th Development Diary - 19th of February 2016

[fellaz007]

Great DD. Thank you for all your good work. Battle plans look great so far. Some sideline questions:

Will it be possible to plan the war mobilization phase as well? I.e. planning the movement of the divisions from their barracks to the borders in the transition from peace to war.

Will it be possible to have several contingency plans and execute only one of them?

This would be super cool!

 

[podcat]

Thanks for the DD!

Does the AI develop battle plans? If so, can you see battle plans developed by AI allies? Will it be possible to coordinate your attack with that of an AI ally? For example, could a human-controlled UK coordinate D-Day with an AI-controlled USA?

yes Ai will make plans and you can see them if you toggle "show allied plans" next to mapmodes. There is no strict "cooperation" system (would love to make one for an expansion) but you can see when AI will launch it and such so you can coordinate yourself to that (we'll talk more about that in invasion diary).

I really do like this hybrid system and I greatly appreciate that microing is still a thing. Some questions, can you see the battle plans of your allies? Can you include your allies in your battle plans? Can you use spies to see the battle plans of your enemies?

Also super excited for the UK diary next week .

spying on plans we had to cut because of lack of time and it not working well. it might make a comeback if we sort out the kinks. for cooperation see above answer.

I think the way it works is you set the plan in stone, and planning bonus accumulates. If you then modify the plan at all, it's effectively a new plan and you start from scratch.

No, you can modify quite a lot right now for no penalty. we are a bit too nice with it. might change towards release. the important thing is that units dont have to move to accommodate your plan changes if you dont want to lose the preparation.

How aggressive are units assigned to a fall-back line in maintaining that line? If the enemy breaches the line, are they going to counter-attack? In general if I assign units to an attack vector will they attack each province as fast as possible or make some kind of judgement that they need to recover ORG before proceeding?

if you draw a fallback plan (or defensive line as we used to call it also) they will actively try to take it back. as for org, yes they wait until they have a certaina mount or it would be wasteful and fail.

Other question please : What are all the triggers, parameters ? Can't I ask to a group to execute its battle plan orders only if weather is clement ? If terrain is not moody ? If air superiority isn't lost ? Etc, how all those important aspects are managed in this automatisation context ?

The system is not designed to automate in this way, its up to you as a player to make the decision and activate (or hold) things. Our initial version actually was more geared at this stuff but it just doesnt work and was too complex.

Do units consume more supply while preparing a battle plan, or only during the actual execution (combat)?

not when preparing, but attacking/moving with the plan yes.

Is there still the concept of plans potentially having multiple stages that you can trigger individually? I'm thinking about the need to keep groups at different parts of the front roughly coordinated. If one group completes their objectives faster than another it would be nice for them to wait at the "Stage 2" starting line until the flag goes up for that.

The first system i showed in Miami at the start of development was based around "Phases" as a thing to let you coordinate among several army groups. it turned out not to work so well so instead you as a player can pause/activate later sections now, but there is no automatic way to tie them together. If you look at my Barbarossa plan above its possible to only activate the first phase and then do the rest later when everythign is in phase (personally I usually activate all and pause the ones who have gotten far enough instead, but its a matter of taste)

 

[Mannstien]

yes, you select them and click Assigment Mode (or hold down Control) and click on the arrow/frontline. So you can set up a forking path as I did in my barbarossa plan above and reassign how many goes with each fork at any moment.

Epic Almost over the loss of OOB now

 

[podcat]

Will it be possible to plan the war mobilization phase as well? I.e. planning the movement of the divisions from their barracks to the borders in the transition from peace to war./QUOTE]

Units in training can be told to deploy directly to a frontline part of a plan so you dont have to babysit your training/production if that is what you mean

Will it be possible to have several contingency plans and execute only one of them?

you could make separate plans, but there is no way to gain preparation for both

 

[Modestus]

Interesting and as expected however I still do not understand why you do not include an arrow that Divisions must follow through specific provinces.


An axis of attack is all very well but Divisions only use it as a guide and while the more direct and straight the axis of attack the more likely Divisions will not stray it seems to me that an axis of attack is not particularly useful for PZ Divisions if you want to make wide sweeping curves to form pincers.


I assume each Offensive Front line has a single axis of attack no matter how wide it is?


I assume each army can have as many Offensive Front lines as they have Divisions?

 

[Kilborn]

This is getting interesting, it looks awesome.

 

[RVallant]

Will there be historical plans to use already in-game?

Will there be a newbie-friendly tutorial on how to use each mechanic of these plans, including, the initial planning, fall back, splitting, encircling and so on?

 

[fellaz007]

Units in training can be told to deploy directly to a frontline part of a plan so you dont have to babysit your training/production if that is what you mean

My question was relating to the fence sitting of the armies during peace (see the deployment during the peacetime WWW). IMHO these peacetime deployments would be unrealistic, because if I deploy my army during peace right at the border to a neighbor, it would and should have serious consequence diplomatically IRL.

In peace time the army should be deployed evenly across the country, in their barracks and do the occasional unit training.

But it would be cool to make one (or several) deployment plans, which would upon execution move my army from the barracks to the borders. E.g. my German army could have a deployment options for several different diplomatic scenarios.

It would also be nice, because it makes the war footing of my army a surprise to my enemies as well.

 

[agentgb]

How will officer bonus play into this? In hoi3 you had to dedicate a certain amount of leadership points into recruiting officers in order to make sure your army was functioning with the correct officer ratio, this is were the great purge would see a huge loss to there officer ratio?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staff_(military)

your military staff would be responsbile for better logistics, planning, contingency planning, intel etc

 

[paranoidsteve]

nice, all as expected from WWW. thanks for the info.

 

[podcat]

Will there be historical plans to use already in-game?

Will there be a newbie-friendly tutorial on how to use each mechanic of these plans, including, the initial planning, fall back, splitting, encircling and so on?

- there wont be historical plans already made no.
- I HOPE so, we were just discussing it in fact. if all else fails I'll make some in my spare time and put on youtube.

 

[Joppos]

Looks really good, i'd love to see it in action. That said, the fact that you're forced to have a loose bunch of divisions on-map is still seriously troubling. It reeks of micromanagement, especially to try and have coherent smaller groups to plan with (coherency being important for example to make sure the right groups are prioritized/at strength prior to operation), and It seems like you'd just end up select-boxing random bunches of divisions and assign them to your plans.
Even just simply having the general groups represented by one map counter each as in hoi1/2 at a certain zoom would be enough to plan much more efficiently. The current proximity based grouping of divisions as you zoom in/out certainly have its uses, but it is not of much help in easing micromanagement if you easily want to allocate and keep track of specific groups of divisions for battle planning.

 

[ingwe]

Seriously looks great! I think this will mean that initiative is actually very important in HOI4! Especially for blitzkrieg vs grand battle.

 

[Harfang28]

When the AI will execute the Battle plan, will it select the best unit under its command to attack a specific province depending of the terrain? Will it send tanks attack mountains and INF attacks plains, like in HoI3 ?

 

[paranoidsteve]

Question, can you give an army on frontier a fallback order, followed by an attack order to be the 2nd phase of the plan? So the following counter attack gains a longer period to gain bonuses.

 

[Secret Master]

Can I have sequential plans that I can activate one after the other for bonuses?

For example:

Let's say I plan Case Oh-Fudge, an invasion of the Soviet Union with a main axis of advance towards Leningrad. I assign the 1st Really Awesome Guderian's Personal Army Group to the plan. I execute the plan and Guderian's Army Group takes Leningrad on D+35. His army group is exhausted and out of planning bonuses.

Can I then activate Case What-In-The-Hell-Are-We-Going-To-Do-Now, a turn towards Moscow from Leningrad (no matter how impractical this might actually be) with 2nd Not Quite As Awesome Rommel's Personal Army Group that has been preparing for 35 days (no combat)? Will they get the bonus for 35 days of prep (if the doctrine allows it) even though that plan assumes control of Leningrad, something we didn't have until yesterday? The units are different and the plan is different, so yes? Or no?

 

[Alandrin]

Happy to see that you can rename your Armies !!
BUT
In the right side panel (inside the Army Badges) >>> Have you considered that instead of the numbers of divisions in that Army, they show the Name/Number of that Army (Pe: 2. Armee)?.
In my opinion it will look much better and will be more intuitive than seeing such big numbers.

 

[ruzen]

This thing will be the selling point of HOI4

 

[Vityviktor]

This is my favourite thing about HOI4.

 

[Nelfe]

This is the feature I'm waiting the most for this game (as I'm very bad at micromanaging every division during Barbarossa), and it seems it'll meet the expectations !