HoI3: Active, Provinceless Combat

[hellfish6]

DanDaMan has given me a lot of food for thought about provinceless combat in another thread, and I thought it was worthy of its own thread. I've added some of my own thoughts to it as well.

The Idea

Remove the province system from HoI3's combat system. Provinces may be retained for some administrative functions, but I prefer - and illustrate here - a totally provinceless system.

Why?

This system makes combat more realistic, as you're not fighting over artificial provinces. Instead you fight over key terrain (point objects) on the map - cities, towns, airfields, ports, bridges, etc.

It also allows for more interesting combat, as you get to move your forces without the constraints of abstract and artificial provinces - some of which in HoI2 could be huge and some of which could be tiny.

How it works

1. Radius of action.

In an active, provinceless combat system ground and naval units are represented by point objects on the map - just like towns and cities. The point determines the map location of that unit and is itself determined by the unit's center of mass. The Radius of Action (RoA) is the range of the unit's influence - the limit of the RoA is determined by a percentage of the unit's combat power. If a division has a 20km RoA (20km from the unit's center of mass), that means that 10% of its combat power is effective. Any enemy unit with its center of mass at the 20km mark will be attacked with 10% of the combat power of the division. Likewise, the enemy will attack as well if your division is within their radius of action. As the distance between the two units closes, the combat power of each division increases. At 10km, your division has 50% of its combat power available to it. When the two units are practically on top of each other, each fights with nearly 100% of its combat power.

Aircraft units likewise have a RoA, but theirs is determined by range from their airbase. If a tactical bomber unit has a 500km RoA, they can attack any target within 500km of their airbase.

Naval units are largely treated as other ground units, except their RoAs will tend to be greater and they are restricted to operating at sea.

2. Supply.

Supply is traced via roads and railroads from major friendly cities. If there is no open road/rail link from your division to a friendly city, that division is out of supply.

3. Attacking, defending, and reserve.

When you're attacking, you select a division (or corps or army) and basically click on the map to give it a destination waypoint. Likewise, if you shift+click on the map you can give the unit multiple waypoints. The speed of the advance will be determined by what terrain the unit's center of gravity is located on. If the unit's CoG is on a mountain, it will be slow. If it is on a road, it will be fast.

When defending, instead of selecting waypoints, you create a defensive line. click and drag to create a defensive line. This line will give the defending unit an RoA bonus, so that they can use their entire RoA without range restrictions.

Reserve posture for a division quadruples the RoA of the division, and likewise decreases the overall effectiveness of the unit. It's useful for garrisons and units not in combat.

Illustrations:



Jamaica (picked because it was a good quality map roughly of the style I like).

You can see the road system (red lines) and the important point objects (towns, city, airfield and port).



Here is the radius of action for a tactical bomber unit based at the Jamaican air base. Also in the pic is the info tab of the airbase, which details the size of the base, the value of the air defenses and radar systems of that base as well as what units are based there. If this was a city info tab, it might show IC capacity of the point object, manpower, resources, etc.



Combat.

Enemy division is red and its RoA is shown with the thin red circle around it. The defensive line is the thick red line on the southeast side of it.

The friendly division is blue, with its RoA shown buy a thin blue circle around it. It has attack waypoints that skirt around the red defensive line. Since the friendly division's center of gravity will not touch the defensive line, the defending enemy unit will not receive a defensive bonus.

Also shown is the unit info screen of the friendly division. This is derived from my Build-Your-Own-Division system, and shows the overall capabilities of the division. It also lets you see what kinds of components your division has (tooltips can tell you if your tank battalion is M4A1s or M5s) as well as buttons to disband or upgrade the division (allowing you to swap out battalions if you want).

Also note the leader screen. In this system, the leader is attached to the division like a brigade of its own. If you combine three divisions into a single corps, each division will retain its general and the corps will have its own general on top of that. Also the general will have personality traits (like Vicky) as well as combat traits (like HoI2).

 

[unmerged(52692)]

The thing that most strikes me about your suggestions, DanDaMan, is that they're too micro-intensive. This is Grand Strategy, at a certain level you just have to assume that generals are taking care of it.

 

[unmerged(41649)]

You wouldn't control anything below the division level still so it's essentially the same level of control as we have now

 

[King of Men]

Very good questions!!

Thank you. It occurs to me, however, that I missed one question that is absolutely crucial: What possible kind of AI would you suggest for this? All the other questions I had were just things that needed to be thought out in detail; but this one is a real killer.

Hmm. I imagine that with supply line cutoff (i.e. no clear path from unit's map point (center of gravity) to a friendly map point (town/city/port/airfield) it would be considered un-supplied, enacting combat penalties against it. If the enemy attacks anywhere outside of its defensive line (see images in first post) the unit could be considered outflanked, incurring another combat penalty.

Define "clear path". Can you trace a path through a defensive line? Presumably not. Past a mobilised enemy division? Not so obvious. Over a river not occupied by the enemy? Through a trackless waste? In a really vast detour through three neutral countries? Or your own country?

Also, every enemy unit that engages that division decreases the amount of combat power that division could apply. If one division attacks a defending division, the defending division can bring 100% of its combat power to bear against the attacker. If two divisions are attacking, the defending division brings 50% of its combat power to bear against each attacker. If you want to go one step further, you could say that for each division over two that attacks, the defender gets an outnumbered penalty.

Fair enough, though the penalty must be scaled to the amount of combat power you're being engaged by.

I think I mentioned that you could assign an air unit a quadrant - roughly a quarter slice of the entire radius to concentrate on. That may have been confusing or lost in my writing, for which I apologize.

The point remains; what if you want to concentrate on the southern slice of that quarter? Or the closer part of whatever slice you end up with? Remember that whatever solution you give will have to have some kind of interface that doesn't require too many clicks.

I imagine you could group them just as now. Every division will increase the size of the group's radius of action.

God, I hope not. I don't want to see my troops engaging targets in Outer Siberia from Poland, just because I put them in an Army Corps as opposed to individual divisions.

Waypoints, or using map points (cities, towns, bridges, ports, airfields, etc) as a route. Or, alternately, click on Moscow and the division will attempt to take the fastest/shortest route between the two points.

Waypoints raises two further questions: Are you going to have to specify waypoints for each of the ninety individual divisions you just ordered to attack Moscow? And anyway, you haven't actually solved the problem, you've only broken it into smaller bits. Given a waypoint, what route do we choose to get there? Saying "do the fastest route" is a bit of a duh; I wanted an algorithm for determining that fastest route, with due attention paid to the problem of having ninety divisions all searching for the best route at the same time. They can't all come up with the same solution, it'll take forever to feed them down a single road.

The defending army would have it's entire combat power used against each of the sides and so would take very heavy losses.

Fine, but meanwhile it's inflicting one division's worth of casualties on ten enemy divisions! In other words, a divisions that's surrounded is suddenly doing ten times the damage it should!

I'm not a programmer, but I would imagine there are some tricks around this. First off, you only have to consider armies which are on a frontline of combat, reserve troops can be ignored. Secondly, you only have to look at frontlines which you share with someone who you are at war with. Then you can break the frontlines down into discretely seperated lengths so that each end of the line terminates at a neutral border or an ocean or something. Then you only have to search the armies that are on the same section of frontline as you.

Then you have two options: Either you search the list of divisions and ask "Are you assigned to front X?", which saves a bit of time since you don't have to do the calculation, but it's probably the memory lookup that the bottleneck rather than the arithmetic. Or else you have each front remember a list of divisions assigned to it, with all the internal management problems that means. Also, you could still get a few hundred divisions on a front; plus, what happens when some units cross the border into a new front area, and suddenly don't get support from their friends 10km away anymore?

How closely can you pack divisions?

not too close

Sorry, but as game design that's really pathetic. How close is "too close"? What do you do when a division has been ordered to go to X, but can't do so without becoming "too close"? Are you going to check the location of every division in the game every time a division wants to move 500 meters, lest it come "too close" to another? O(n^2), dude.

Suppose you order your division to march to Moscow; how does it choose which route to take?

If it was a mobilized division it would take a straight line or a set of waypoints you give it.

God, I hope not, considering that the straight line could

a) take it across the Baltic
b) take it through a neutral country
c) be ten times slower than using the perfectly good road.

As for waypoints, see my response above.

 

[hito1]

What O(n^2) means?

 

[Myth]

Sorry, but as game design that's really pathetic. How close is "too close"? What do you do when a division has been ordered to go to X, but can't do so without becoming "too close"? Are you going to check the location of every division in the game every time a division wants to move 500 meters, lest it come "too close" to another? O(n^2), dude.

what about no more than x% overlap of the two or more divisions' area of action/whatever it was called?

 

[hellfish6]

Thank you. It occurs to me, however, that I missed one question that is absolutely crucial: What possible kind of AI would you suggest for this? All the other questions I had were just things that needed to be thought out in detail; but this one is a real killer.

What kind of AI? What kind do you offer? I'm not an AI programmer. The map is littered with point objects (the cities, towns, bridges, ports, airfields, etc). These could all be weighed (given point values) and tell the program to seize as many objectives in an enemy territory as possible. A defensive AI would attempt to protect its own point objects. A maneuverist AI would attempt to seize only infrastructure point objects, an attritionist AI would attempt to destroy enemy unit point objects.

Yes, this needs more thought but I don't know if I'm qualified to offer it.

Define "clear path". Can you trace a path through a defensive line? Presumably not. Past a mobilised enemy division? Not so obvious. Over a river not occupied by the enemy? Through a trackless waste? In a really vast detour through three neutral countries? Or your own country?

Clear path does not encounter any enemy RoA. No neutral countries. Think of it as an unbroken link between a unit and it's supply source - i.e. if the supply source is on the other side of the river, but the bridge between the two is destroyed or captured by enemy forces, that unit is out of supply. Certain terrain types could prevent supply tracing as well. For example - mountains, forests, rivers, swamps and oceans all block supply. Maybe throw in a distance penalty too?

Fair enough, though the penalty must be scaled to the amount of combat power you're being engaged by.

Yes.

The point remains; what if you want to concentrate on the southern slice of that quarter? Or the closer part of whatever slice you end up with? Remember that whatever solution you give will have to have some kind of interface that doesn't require too many clicks.

For gameplay, you probably shouldn't be able to concentrate on a subdivision of a subdivision. Any enemy unit in that quarter will be attacked equally.

God, I hope not. I don't want to see my troops engaging targets in Outer Siberia from Poland, just because I put them in an Army Corps as opposed to individual divisions.

I realize you're exaggerating, but don't think of it like that. A two-division corps will not have twice the RoA of a single division - rather maybe 5% larger, but combat power will be greater within the two division RoA. Grouping into corps/armies assumes a concentration of forces in a single area.

Waypoints raises two further questions: Are you going to have to specify waypoints for each of the ninety individual divisions you just ordered to attack Moscow? And anyway, you haven't actually solved the problem, you've only broken it into smaller bits. Given a waypoint, what route do we choose to get there? Saying "do the fastest route" is a bit of a duh; I wanted an algorithm for determining that fastest route, with due attention paid to the problem of having ninety divisions all searching for the best route at the same time. They can't all come up with the same solution, it'll take forever to feed them down a single road.

Theoretically I don't see why not. If they're not all sharing the same start point, they're not likely to develop the same route. If you have a unit in Berlin and you give it a single waypoint in Moscow, it will find a different route than a division starting in Danzig or Kiev.

Plenty of games that exist that let you place a single waypoint, analyze the intervening terrain, and find the fastest route. If there is a swamp between Berlin and Moscow, the pathfinding algorithm should be able to identify and make a concession for that to avoid the swamp.

I don't see this being an idea killer.

Fine, but meanwhile it's inflicting one division's worth of casualties on ten enemy divisions! In other words, a divisions that's surrounded is suddenly doing ten times the damage it should!

I think you misunderstand. The division won't be doling out 100% of its combat power to each of the ten surrounding divisions. Instead, it will focus a proportional amount of its combat power on each of those divisions. Hence, 10 divisions will each be dealing with 10% of the combat power of that single encircled division, minus whatever other penalties that encircled division has.

 

[unmerged(41649)]

Fine, but meanwhile it's inflicting one division's worth of casualties on ten enemy divisions! In other words, a divisions that's surrounded is suddenly doing ten times the damage it should!

For the system I am talking about, you calculate combat against the attackers which are opposite of you. If 1 small division is surrounded, there would be a small circular frontline with the single division on the inside and there would be the enemy divisions wrapped around the outside.

Then you have two options: Either you search the list of divisions and ask "Are you assigned to front X?", which saves a bit of time since you don't have to do the calculation, but it's probably the memory lookup that the bottleneck rather than the arithmetic. Or else you have each front remember a list of divisions assigned to it, with all the internal management problems that means. Also, you could still get a few hundred divisions on a front; plus, what happens when some units cross the border into a new front area, and suddenly don't get support from their friends 10km away anymore?

I don't understand what you mean when some units cross the border into a new front area? A division can never actually cross the border because they ould bring the border with them. As for the programming side, I'm sure it can all be worked out by somebody smart. It doesn't sound like the biggest challenge in the world compared to the things that I have seen computers do.

Sorry, but as game design that's really pathetic. How close is "too close"? What do you do when a division has been ordered to go to X, but can't do so without becoming "too close"? Are you going to check the location of every division in the game every time a division wants to move 500 meters, lest it come "too close" to another? O(n^2), dude.

Fine, "too close" is anything more than 20000 soldiers per square kilometre. Divisions are grouped as corps right. So the areaof a corps is the close packed density spread out over a circular area, the radius of which increases as square root of size. If another corps hits it, they are stopped where the two radii meet. But I mean come on man, I'm not trying to design the specifics of a game here, just the ideas. Your next question better not ask for the source code of how all of these ideas work.

 

[unmerged(54933)]

Im imagining planning an attack as a series of waypoint clicks:
for example: select division, then a line with specific lenght (for infantry short, for armor long) - like max 1 day range, clik on where you want. when you outreach the day limit, the first line stop and second is drawn from that point(another color). when you clik from polish border to moscow, it will be partitioned to X lines (or arrows of advance) in a line. of course you cold click each day advance line to another point so you can create a zig-zag pattern or whatewer you want.

Massing the units: It was normal that units crossed area of operation of other units (for example plan for Army group Mittel in northern part of Kursk salient - infantry division would throw out enemy defending units, than tank division will exploit the breakthrougs or wider holes between enemy units)
I thing you could get more divisions in the same area, of course at the cost of speed of both of them (like slowing the advance of XXX. British corps at the road to hell in Market Garden Operation)

Air strikes:
you select bomber unit and you could have a small circle of combat area which you could place within range of bombers. air support was allways aimed at the strict area (only sweeps, or free hunt missions were flew to wider area).

 

[Acheron]

In Command HQ, you could move amries indivdually, territories were assigned to a city, whoever took the city got the territory around it (not that it mattered much there). Just a suggestion

 

[unmerged(61731)]

What about when peace is made and there are border changes? How will these be decided? It would be great to have a fluid system because at the moment it is difficult to find province(s) of the enemy that will actually fit into the shape of you country and not make it look really weird. Maybe you could draw a line on the enemy country, linking to your border, to show how much you want to demand. The area of land plus industry etc. will determine how likely this is to succeed.

Maybe this could be down to the level of claiming individual towns, cities etc.

Any ideas?

 

[Phoenix Dace]

I actually oppose this idea. Yes, I can see the benefits, and so on and so forth, but there are some problems which I don't really see as being feasibly removable with the proposed system.

1) This turns the game from a strategic game into a strategic-tactical game. One of the things I like about HOI2 is that it is very abstract and large-scale. I don't have to be a tactical genius to play the game. I can say 'okay, here's an army, it attacks' and it does it. If I were tactically inept but a strategic genius, I could get all my armies in place perfectly but, under the new system, lose the fight because I was stupid enough to attack the town in a dumb way, meaning the two Chinese divisions defending defeat my attacking nine crack Japanese divisions. In the game, you're not playing every military leader. You're playing the overall leaders of the nation. You are the planners and organizers, not the major-generals.

2) Excessive micromanagement. In the current system, I don't need to worry about my marines landing on the island. I tell them to land and they do it, leaving me free to worry about the massive invasion of Japan I have planned. In the proposed system, I have to go and take care of the marines while all the same jumping back and forth to have the fleets get in position and then I have to worry about micromanaging seven landings at once on the home isles, then I have to worry about landing the troops in the right place, all the while jumping back and forth between the marines on Iwo Jima, the forces in Japan, and my troops fighting in Germany. I don't want to have to be worrying about my marines losing on Iwo Jima because my attention is distracted by the seventy divisions landing in Japan. This leads directly into #3.

3) Slows down the game a lot. Currently, you tell a division to attack, it attacks, you win, your division advances. Under the new system, you would have to order the division to attack, worry about its flanks, etc. It would take a very long time to order every single division to advance at the start of Barbarossa, and then would need excessive amounts of time to organize the entire attack from there on, giving orders to every division and so on. Not to mention having to very slowly play the game while combat is on, because if there are two combats happening at the same time you essentially have to pause every hour and jump back and forth between them to micromanage your troops in each.

4) Essentially removes the advantages of good leaders. The whole point of the leader system is that the good ones are good at unit-level tactics, while the player worries about strategic-level thinking. In the new system, Patton would be essentially the same as some unnamed major-general, because you're ordering his division about anyway. I know that the proposed system included leaders for each division, but that's redundant if you're commanding every division. You would essentially be every division commander, removing the need for the generals. After all, if Patton doesn't get to command his own troops, what is the point of having him rather than some nameless loser?

5) Causes problems in certain aspects of gameplay. For example, in the current system, you have a division on Jamaica. That division contests beach landings. After a little while of fighting, if you didn't win the fight already, you can probably assume that the landings succeeded and you are now fighting on the land of the island. Under the new system, looking at the map from the first page, you don't get to contest the beach landings unless you're very lucky in your placement of the one defending division. Unless it is also being proposed to be able to split up the divisions into brigades and batallions so that you can place them on every beach on the island and have a hope of not suddenly being on equal terms with the invaders because they landed where you had no troops, which causes even more excessive micromanagement.

6) Makes the map too small. I don't want to have to be so zoomed in to take care of one combat that I can't see what's happening across the rest of the line. Then, if I zoom out, I can't see what's happening in that battle again, and I start losing. For example, having the map so zoomed in on Jamaica, or Truk, or Diego Garcia Island, that I can't see the rest of the world. If I zoom out, I can't fight the battle. If I zoom in, I become the major-general and suddenly lose all scope of what's going on around me. Hell, there could be a huge American fleet moving in to contest my landing and I can't see it coming because I'm so zoomed in on the fight.

7) Excessively excessive microplacement of IC, infrastructure, resources, manpower, etc. If you still have a province system for IC, resources, and infrastructure, then you run into things like the fact that in some parts of the Sahara there is one road that travels from north to south and everyone travelling there has to take it or they die, combined with 'what if all of this province's IC is in the north? But I've taken the north but I haven't taken all the province so I don't get to take the IC'. If you get rid of the province system for those things, then you get micromanagement of where exactly in each factory is placed, how many factories and of what type are needed to make 'an IC', and so on. Dear god, I can't even imagine what the hell kind of research would be needed for such a system. It's colossal and it frightens me to think about it. Not to mention having to individually point, drag, and click new roads to build infrastructure? The horror.

8) No way to turn it off. If they make the game this way, Paradox will isolate a very large amount of their player base, which plays HOI2 not for tactics, but for strategy. Suddenly discovering that in order to win you HAVE to be able to do both would be very disappointing and would probably make a lot of people not play the game. Since the game can only be one way - provinces or not - whoever wanted the other way will be out of luck. There would be no way to turn this off if you didn't like it, and I feel fairly confident that a lot of people would find a lot of problems with it very quickly if they were playing it. I know that I don't play HOI2 to micromanage the 1300 divisions I could have as the Soviet Union. Suddenly discovering I HAD to in order to play the game would turn me off it very quickly, and I would go back to Doomsday.

9) Departing from everything Paradox has done in the past. It would essentially require a whole new team of game developers such as those that have made all the hex-based boardgames and how they work. Paradox deals in grand strategy and every game they have made in the grand strategy department has been done with provinces and, usually, with modified versions of the original EU engine. This proposal would require a whole new team working a whole new way, and a whole new program engine to run it on.

10) Dear god, can you even imagine the level of micromanagement needed? I don't quite think you see the scope of what you're proposing. This means commanding EVERY DIVISION for Barbarossa. It means pausing every hour to divide your time between the seven fights in Manchuria, the three in Persia, and the thirty in Germany, to make sure your units aren't losing in any of them. It means worrying about the composition of every division you build. It means having to order seventy individual divisions to do different things when you're declared war on. It means clicking the mouse millions of times. It means worrying about individual division-on-division combat for fifty divisions which are fighting fifty divisions, while at the same time worrying about this corps which is part of the fifty divisions and what it's doing, while at the same time worrying about the fifty divisions as a whole, while at the same time worrying about the hundreds of divisions around you. Fighting on more than one front would be impossible unless you were willing to devote hours of real life time to playing two hours of the game. Given the amount of people that have posted in support of this, and now thinking about this and writing all these problems down, I'm very scared that Paradox would actually implement this. Please, no.

I mean, really. Really think about all the micromanagement needed.





On the other hand, I like some of hellfish's ideas about such things as the option of assigning a major-general to every division even when they are part of a corps. I like that idea. And the possibility to create your own division if you want to, while still having preset ones if you want, is intriguing, though I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement.

 

[unmerged(68135)]

Honestly I can fin several things you didn't take into account in your post, but I'm to lazy and will let Hellfish do it. Yet you make many good points as well.

 

[JFeatherston]

I like this idea

 

[unmerged(79415)]

A lot of this was tl;dr, so I'll just respond to the first post and the general idea.

It's great, but it's not Hearts of Iron. Having played many Paradox games (HoI, EU, EU2, HoI2, Vicky), I can honestly say that they are all based on the same fundamental ideas- provincial control to represent grand strategy. I really, really like this idea, but it would be better suited to a new series, rather than to the HoI franchise.

One giant problem jumps at me: How would the designers represent every strategic objective on Earth? There are lots of otherwise nameless hills and valleys and ridges (probably tens of thousands) that were crucial to operations and therefore strategic objectives that would have to be represented; otherwise the whole system is a moot point.

Anyways, like I said, I'd rather see a new game (perhaps a WW1-in-Europe game, which would limit the scope) than HoI3 adopting this system.

 

[hellfish6]

A lot of this was tl;dr, so I'll just respond to the first post and the general idea.

It's great, but it's not Hearts of Iron. Having played many Paradox games (HoI, EU, EU2, HoI2, Vicky), I can honestly say that they are all based on the same fundamental ideas- provincial control to represent grand strategy. I really, really like this idea, but it would be better suited to a new series, rather than to the HoI franchise.

One giant problem jumps at me: How would the designers represent every strategic objective on Earth? There are lots of otherwise nameless hills and valleys and ridges (probably tens of thousands) that were crucial to operations and therefore strategic objectives that would have to be represented; otherwise the whole system is a moot point.

Anyways, like I said, I'd rather see a new game (perhaps a WW1-in-Europe game, which would limit the scope) than HoI3 adopting this system.

There are resources out there for the info - geographic and political. Of course some might have to be abstracted, but I think in a right context it could be doable.

And I agree - it's probably best left to another game that doesn't use the EU engine as we know it.

 

[unmerged(84988)]

I like this idea. Sort of like Rome: Total War, where there are provinces and maybe a 2D map but it's got free range of units and everything.

 

[The_Carbonater]

Like a lot of this (especially the provinceless system) but most of it are sadly not suited for HoI
Maybe a mod?

 

[unmerged(89075)]

DanDaMan has given me a lot of food for thought about provinceless combat in another thread, and I thought it was worthy of its own thread. I've added some of my own thoughts to it as well.

The Idea

Remove the province system from HoI3's combat system. Provinces may be retained for some administrative functions, but I prefer - and illustrate here - a totally provinceless system.

Why?

This system makes combat more realistic, as you're not fighting over artificial provinces. Instead you fight over key terrain (point objects) on the map - cities, towns, airfields, ports, bridges, etc.

It also allows for more interesting combat, as you get to move your forces without the constraints of abstract and artificial provinces - some of which in HoI2 could be huge and some of which could be tiny.

How it works

1. Radius of action.

In an active, provinceless combat system ground and naval units are represented by point objects on the map - just like towns and cities. The point determines the map location of that unit and is itself determined by the unit's center of mass. The Radius of Action (RoA) is the range of the unit's influence - the limit of the RoA is determined by a percentage of the unit's combat power. If a division has a 20km RoA (20km from the unit's center of mass), that means that 10% of its combat power is effective. Any enemy unit with its center of mass at the 20km mark will be attacked with 10% of the combat power of the division. Likewise, the enemy will attack as well if your division is within their radius of action. As the distance between the two units closes, the combat power of each division increases. At 10km, your division has 50% of its combat power available to it. When the two units are practically on top of each other, each fights with nearly 100% of its combat power.

Aircraft units likewise have a RoA, but theirs is determined by range from their airbase. If a tactical bomber unit has a 500km RoA, they can attack any target within 500km of their airbase.

Naval units are largely treated as other ground units, except their RoAs will tend to be greater and they are restricted to operating at sea.

2. Supply.

Supply is traced via roads and railroads from major friendly cities. If there is no open road/rail link from your division to a friendly city, that division is out of supply.

3. Attacking, defending, and reserve.

When you're attacking, you select a division (or corps or army) and basically click on the map to give it a destination waypoint. Likewise, if you shift+click on the map you can give the unit multiple waypoints. The speed of the advance will be determined by what terrain the unit's center of gravity is located on. If the unit's CoG is on a mountain, it will be slow. If it is on a road, it will be fast.

When defending, instead of selecting waypoints, you create a defensive line. click and drag to create a defensive line. This line will give the defending unit an RoA bonus, so that they can use their entire RoA without range restrictions.

Reserve posture for a division quadruples the RoA of the division, and likewise decreases the overall effectiveness of the unit. It's useful for garrisons and units not in combat.

Illustrations:



Jamaica (picked because it was a good quality map roughly of the style I like).

You can see the road system (red lines) and the important point objects (towns, city, airfield and port).



Here is the radius of action for a tactical bomber unit based at the Jamaican air base. Also in the pic is the info tab of the airbase, which details the size of the base, the value of the air defenses and radar systems of that base as well as what units are based there. If this was a city info tab, it might show IC capacity of the point object, manpower, resources, etc.



Combat.

Enemy division is red and its RoA is shown with the thin red circle around it. The defensive line is the thick red line on the southeast side of it.

The friendly division is blue, with its RoA shown buy a thin blue circle around it. It has attack waypoints that skirt around the red defensive line. Since the friendly division's center of gravity will not touch the defensive line, the defending enemy unit will not receive a defensive bonus.

Also shown is the unit info screen of the friendly division. This is derived from my Build-Your-Own-Division system, and shows the overall capabilities of the division. It also lets you see what kinds of components your division has (tooltips can tell you if your tank battalion is M4A1s or M5s) as well as buttons to disband or upgrade the division (allowing you to swap out battalions if you want).

Also note the leader screen. In this system, the leader is attached to the division like a brigade of its own. If you combine three divisions into a single corps, each division will retain its general and the corps will have its own general on top of that. Also the general will have personality traits (like Vicky) as well as combat traits (like HoI2).

it would make the blitzkrieg and falaise gap possible! (falaise is on the line or argentan and caen)

 

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as for defense, if you have alot of divisions, you can make your line compact. you can stretch your divisionsif you have little forces. it would mean that a nation doesnt have 300 tank divisions as defense would be possible (USA currently has 10 active divisions, 1 million men in the Army (Reserve and Guard too).

 

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It's pretty dorky when you select a unit and order it to go to another province, and it just goes bip bip bip done.

It makes things like suprise attacks or other things impossible. It'd be interesting to see this implimented on a 2D map.