Help with France

[Crazyi]

I am playing as France, and I just don't understand what I am doing wrong. My problem seems to come from my front line that it just seems to ball up and die. Two times now they have punched a hole in the center of my line, and 4 enemy units run all the way to Paris while I still have a 50+man standing army. I have Air superiority in France. I own the sea around Germany.

I know France's troops are not optimized well and that is the first thing I do when I get army exp. I have read into the theory behind this, and other nations I have played as seem to do extremely well.

I have roughly a 55 stack army when Germany attacks. I set the front line at our border where its fortified 10/10. For some reason the line will always put almost half this army in the southernmost province, and then it divides the other half with no rhyme or reason among the remaining line. I personally feel it should divide the army up roughly evenly between the regions, but that sure as hell is not what happens.

I have tried splitting the armies in two, put one Armies front on the southern half and the other half on the North. Tried this once, didn't work.

Almost all of France is 6/10 infrastructure or higher, some being 10/10. I build Air defense in the eastern provinces. I have a surplus of supplies when the war starts and it doesn't seem to be the issue.

I figured before I start one off of Ironman to play around with this I would ask here first.

 

[davej]

Front line balling up is a real bug. I had similar issues with just a 2 province front line with Denmark and Germany - all divisions on one province and not the other. I figured it was covered and that's just how the graphics rolled. Wrong. German divisions went right through.

 

[Diados]

The defensive line doesn't work very well in the current version. Once a province is lost/gained it will recalculate and shuffle all the troops. I have found the best thing to do is to put them on the line initially then delete the plan and spread them out manually. That way I am sure they will keep their entrenchment bonus.

 

[Kaosium]

I am playing as France, and I just don't understand what I am doing wrong. My problem seems to come from my front line that it just seems to ball up and die. Two times now they have punched a hole in the center of my line, and 4 enemy units run all the way to Paris while I still have a 50+man standing army. I have Air superiority in France. I own the sea around Germany.

I know France's troops are not optimized well and that is the first thing I do when I get army exp. I have read into the theory behind this, and other nations I have played as seem to do extremely well.

I have roughly a 55 stack army when Germany attacks. I set the front line at our border where its fortified 10/10. For some reason the line will always put almost half this army in the southernmost province, and then it divides the other half with no rhyme or reason among the remaining line. I personally feel it should divide the army up roughly evenly between the regions, but that sure as hell is not what happens.

I have tried splitting the armies in two, put one Armies front on the southern half and the other half on the North. Tried this once, didn't work.

Almost all of France is 6/10 infrastructure or higher, some being 10/10. I build Air defense in the eastern provinces. I have a surplus of supplies when the war starts and it doesn't seem to be the issue.

I figured before I start one off of Ironman to play around with this I would ask here first.

I no longer use the Battle Planner for troops manning the Maginot Line (or its cousins I will often build along the Low Country frontier and in the Alps) as when I first did it, several iterations of patches ago, it would sometimes vacate one hex of the line completely for whatever idiot reason, I think it was intending on rotating some units out and others in but the Germans managed to attack when the units were in transition and the Maginot Line fell. I decided then and there That. Would. Never. Happen Again. Thus now all my fortress garrisons on the frontier are manually placed and then assigned my Garrison commander (I use Weygand) and not movable at the whim of the battle planner. It has since occurred to me that I could probably just 'charge them up' with planning bonus by individually giving them a 'front' of one hex where they are placed and a 'plan' of just the foreign hex next to them and they ought not move, but I've not yet tried that as losing one of those fortresses is often a game-breaker and I don't actually ever use those garrison units to attack with anyway except at the end when I'm on the road to Berlin anyway and I throw them into the breech to end it more quickly as it no longer matters.

What I do now is man the Maginot Line more or less with what it starts with, moving the two infantry next to Metz into the empty Maginot hex next to it and the one with three at the southernmost hex (Mulhouse?) moves one regular infantry into the hex north of it that starts with only one. I then man the rest of the Low Country frontier with (initially) one of the regular infantry units, seven more hexes up to Dunkerque, which I will later reinforce with 42 Marine divisions along with my Mobile troops for the invasion. I also generally build a lower-level fortress line of about five-six levels (with defensive focus and the fortress foci) along the Alps and Low Country frontier or at least 3-4 levels when I go Offensive by slipping into 'Construction Engineering' continual focus for a little while before I expect the Germans to attack.

Note that nowadays I generally choose 'Go Left' and thus don't declare over Poland and in that scenario the Germans will attack and take the Low Countries in September of '39 and thus be at the French frontier by the end of the month, but don't declare on France until August of '40, usually on the first of the month. When I played the other scenarios (under earlier patches) I found that no forts were needed at all, as Germany wouldn't attack the Low Countries until Spring of '40 and you could send your troops in and hold the riverline and rough terrain in Belgium and the Netherlands and they'd never get closer to France than the Maginot Line, which I have never seen fall provided I had at least two infantry in it, (at least one regular) though of course those infantry will have engineers added as well as artillery and anti-tank by the time the German comes knocking at the door.

 

[Crazyi]

Ty for responses. Stuff to try!

 

[redrum68]

Yeah, essentially there is no need to use the battle planner for defense just place your divisions in an intelligent manner yourself. Only use for the battle planner is on attack to get the planning bonus (then delete the plans and micro your troops) and on amphibious assaults since you have to use it. Hopefully they eventually completely revamp the battle planner to either work well and players have to use it or make it purely optional and let planning bonus along with all attacks be able to be micromanaged.

 

[davej]

Yeah, essentially there is no need to use the battle planner for defense just place your divisions in an intelligent manner yourself. Only use for the battle planner is on attack to get the planning bonus (then delete the plans and micro your troops) and on amphibious assaults since you have to use it. Hopefully they eventually completely revamp the battle planner to either work well and players have to use it or make it purely optional and let planning bonus along with all attacks be able to be micromanaged.

I wasn't aware that you retain the planning bonus if you delete the front line plan.

 

[Kaosium]

I wasn't aware that you retain the planning bonus if you delete the front line plan.

You don't, and any planning bonus you have starts to deteriorate if your plan is disrupted, even if it's the AI who's responsible for that by eliminating it due to a different front configuration, often because your allies have taken or lost a hex which was a a part of it. A goodly portion of my games are dominated by me having to run back and forth between Spain and China making sure all my volunteers still have their plans intact so they're recovering their bonus when not taking fire. It keeps me occupied.

 

[Surimi]

Note that you can fix the balling up by microing. As long as you tell a division to move somewhere on the frontline it will stay there unless another part of the line is blatantly undefended, so you can manually spread troops out along the line as you need to. It is rather irritating, I know, but I find overall its better to use a battleline than not as the AI will shuffle troops along the line to reinforce as necessary to some degree (not perfectly though, it still needs some supervision now and again). I get that some people won't like that because they don't want to lose the entrenchment bonus, but divisions which are forced back lose entrenchment anyway.