Here lay a half-baked solution which artificially gimped the French doctrines. It was rubbish, and now rests in pieces.
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How much of an advantage do the allies start with at the beginning of the game?
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Was it really that the French doctrines were that out of date, or was it more like they had a good defense in depth doctrine, but ignored it by committing their reserve to extend the line into Belgium in such a way that they were vulnerable. The problem as I see it was more command blunder than doctrinal.
Making up arbitrarily gimped doctrines which they are forced to follow is no less fudging reality to get the desired end result than reducing their OOB is.
Making up arbitrarily gimped doctrines which they are forced to follow is no less fudging reality to get the desired end result than reducing their OOB is.
More than one person has written about how the actual execution of French plans in 1940 seemed to fly in the face of stated goals. A case could be made that Gamelin broke with some portions of accepted doctrine (certainly not all) by moving troops into Belgium in a way that left the center so exposed.
I mean, some of Gamelin's subordinates pointed out the problem before the attack came. It's not like we're just Monday Morning quarterbacking it.
I don't think there will be any such thing as an arbitrarily gimped doctrine. But France may either be assigned a less than optimal doctrine for her situation at game start, or she may find it difficult to progress along a doctrine path enough to keep pace with German doctrines.
After all, there are several sound defensive strategies that have no bearing on France's position in 1940. Picking one of them doesn't invalidate the doctrine so much as demonstrate its lack of utility in that particular situation.
I hope there won't be really suboptimal doctrines. Doctrines should grant an advantage, no matter how small it is, and not a disadvantage. I'm fine with the german doctrine granting more advantages, but the french doctrine should not cripple them. In DH, the Soviet doctrine is so bad, that by just switching doctrines (for the mobility one), you can nearly go on the offensive at the start of Barbarossa.
The French doctrine did in fact call for reserves, without which serious defense cannot be sustained. Gamelin broke doctrine by spending all of his reserves.
I think it bears noting that French doctrine is not necessarily defensive as often supposed - otherwise they would not be having so many tanks for infantry support (with the tanks being almost entirely offensive weapons when used in this role) to the point that they have entire monstrous "Cuirassiere" Divisions made up of Char B tanks whose only purpose in life (at least according to French doctrine) was to smash open enemy trench lines for the infantry to walk over.
Rather, the French doctrine believed in what some historians have termed as the "managed battle" - whose focus is on central control of various units fighting at a deliberately slow pace, with the main idea being that artillery was (rightly) still the main battlefield killer and what was important was to "manage" the battle such that this precious resource of artillery was properly allocated to whatever sector that needed it. Indeed, parallels to later-war Soviet tactical doctrine and US Army "fire mission" systems are abound when studying French doctrine.
The problem is that no doctrine can fix the much bigger problem there was simply not enough troops to stop an entire Panzer Army when the breakout at Sedan happened. Indeed, a doctrine predicated on central control and having relatively safe and untouched artillery was going to fall apart when your frontline has been broken and army-sized forces are roaming your rear areas. In that sense, the doctrine contributed to French defeat, but the issue is that the breakthrough should not have been allowed to occur in the first place.
See, that's the thing I don't understand. If central control was so important to the French doctrine, why didn't they have better communication? Did the Luftwaffe cut all telephone lines?
No the Germans sent in spies to act as the local operator and all calls were then sent to an Indian help desk call center.
This is true. Rather than the French doctrines being worse, the German doctrines should be better. And the player should have the chance to reform the French doctrines.
So the doctrines will result in a 100% improved combat performance? If not 100% then how much?
The German doctrines will give massive bonuses to armoured and close air support attack, while the French starting doctrines give them none of these. French doctrines may require infantry and tanks to be more mixed, to represent France using anks in an infantry support role. That, plus the tank radios and better AI programming encouraging breakthroughs while France's AI is mostly static, will make Germany superior to France in AI against AI fights.
Just my opinion, but I think there is as much potential to accomplish some of this by giving the French bad division templates initially. There are going to have little exp prior to 1940 with which to improve things. Rather than converting the category B divisions to MIL or GAR, you could have a template for them which would not perform well.
No, I don't have a specific battalion mix in mind to accomplish this. Yes, I understand that this might not match what their TO&E showed on paper. I still think the templates themselves are potentially a strong balancing tool isntead of thinking in old version terms like MIL or GAR divisions.
No, I don't have a specific battalion mix in mind to accomplish this. Yes, I understand that this might not match what their TO&E showed on paper. I still think the templates themselves are potentially a strong balancing tool isntead of thinking in old version terms like MIL or GAR divisions.
The assumption of the French was that communications would still proceed largely at the pace of the First World War - meaning rather slowly through messengers because the telephone lines kept getting cut to the frontline troops by artillery shellfire - and that units in combat would hold on long enough for artillery to be properly redirected. This wasn't a terribly bad assumption - even the Germans had just started pioneering command vehicles full of radios at this point and that still wasn't exactly a perfect solution for army-wide movements; and a lot of their movements were initiated at the tactical rather than strategic command anyway (the much vaunted and overrated "initiative" system) which, while effective against an enemy with shoddier command & control, was a recipe for chaos against a fully-functioning enemy.
In practice, the French command structure was moribundly slow - as at least one other posted noted before Gamelin basically locked himself away in an isolated cottage and had no idea where his own units were. A lot of it really falls on the heads of the generals rather than the mode of communication.
The Soviets and Americans both eventually made this system work using two different approaches:
The Soviets made heavy use of misdirection and massing of overwhelming force in key sector - so that when they attacked/defended the Germans in the critical sector would have to wade through so many enemy units that the Soviets had time to redirect their arty fire (which had pretty slow response times); which is partly why you have so many accounts of German frontline troops saying they were facing gazillions of Soviet troops (when in reality, the Soviets were just better at massing and infiltrating troops where they wanted to).
The Americans meanwhile made no attempt to slow the battle down, and accepted that combat was going to be fast-paced. Instead, they decided to improve on their communication system and forward observer system - all of which was possible given the far more advanced nature of the US electronics industry (seriously, Germany's much-vaunted electronics/radios was actually extremely primitive compared to America's - because all they really had was the Siemens company and the director of that company hated the Nazis). With good portable radios, a well thought-out system for calling down fire missions, and a highly responsive and well-supplied artillery system (who actually fired more tonnage of shells than the Soviets despite the Red Army having more guns), the Americans could basically hold a frontline with just a few foxholes and FOs - because as long as one FO position survived, you're going to have entire companies or even battalions obliterated by shellfire the moment they come out into the open.
In short, the French doctrine was ultimately doable and correct in concept; as the concept itself was copied (or rather, developed in parallel) by later Allied armies. The problem lay with the execution - the French simply didn't have enough bodies to slow the battle down as they wanted (exacerbated by the spending of the reserves) and the generalship was moribundly slow and made this situation even worse.
Interesting points, but I think a good part of why the Americans fired more aggregate tonnage comes down to supply rather than doctrine.
French infantry were not militia or garrisons. Representing them as such is wrong.
Even my opponents agree that Germany's superiority over France was mostly in tactics, command and doctrine. It is therefore these areas where Germany had the advantage. France should not be forced to build bad divisions, though I can understand forbidding countries from using concentrated armour unless they have the doctrine, which France would not at the start of the game, or under AI control.
So the 55th INF division which was made up of no officers with any combat experience and very little training, made up of reservists over 30 years of age, whose primary duty was construction, who had no combat training is regular infantry? Just because something is called infantry doesn't mean in fact they are.
And how exactly do you prevent this? Do you prevent a province from having more than one tank battalion in it? Just saying that a template is restricted to one tank battalion per division does nothing. I just build a one regiment division with 1 tank battalion + 2 infantry battalions and then let these "divisions" fight together.
The 55th was a very poor division, but had these men been given proper officers and training, they could have made a decent fighting force. They were still an infantry division, just a rubbish one. Individual divisions should have their own level of officers, training and so on to reflect this.
Sending a whole load of 1 regiment divisions to fight would result in a jumbled and confused chain of command. This would have a negative effect on combat ability. Tanks under French doctrines could also be less organised when attacking without infantry support, since they were not trained for such advances.
The player, as I have said, should not be forced to act as stupidly as the real French. He can concentrate his tanks if he wishes. But the AI should be programmed to spread them out along the line.
Since officers haven't been mentioned that leave just training. So tell me what is the difference in a militia (volkstrum) vs. this low grade division?
Not sure how stacking will work in HOI4 and if there will or won't be a penalty but outside of a possible stacking penalty it won't have any effect. There is no "chain of command" involved but instead you assign divisions to a leader then issue orders according tot he video on the battle plan. So once again it's nice in theory but the game most likely doesn't work that way.
The AI will not be programmed this way. PDS has said many times that they only make one AI for all countries and it's the best and strongest possible AI they can program.
The AI itself will be uniform across all countries, but this does not mean that different nations will not have different production priorities (in the past these have been hardcoded for the most part.) It also does not mean that all nations must start with the same division templates or doctrines, obviously.
Yes I agree. Sorry for the confusion. When I said AI I was referring to the combat AI. The AI that tells how to move units and how and when to attack.
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