HQs, Command Structure and OOBs

[jju_57]

No one is saying that the CoC system in Hoi3 was perfect, far from it. It needed some attention, but it did not need to be dumped. Tossing it out is like expelling the gifted boy with ADD for disturbing the class when all he needs is a little extra attention.

What I'm saying is this statement is premature. After all HOI3 had a supply system that wasn't perfect and air combat that wasn't perfect. Yet these mechanics are being replaced from what we know.

A CoC without it doing anything is a waste. HOI3's CoC was very close to a waste because it really didn't do much. Honestly outside of possible immersion what did it do?

So now HOI4 has a battle planner. There will be some kind of divisional assignments in it. But does the battle planner need to know that the divisions I assign to Rommel (corps) report to some army and then OKH? What does that add to the battle planner? Most likely nothing. But we have to wait and see when they post how the battle planner will look in it's final version. After all didn't Podcat say that it has gone through something like three revisions so far?

 

[Darkath]

The CoC wouldn't do nothing as you claim. We have quite clearly elaborated on the various use it could have in game and ties with the existing Battle Planner.

Primarilly just to have a way to organize your armies into subgroups of divisions, and thus being able to assign those subgroups to various battleplans vectors quickly, clearly and efficiently.

Imagine an hypothetical 25 divisions Ist army, led by Rundstedt. I just want to be able to create in that army a few subgroups that i'd call Ist, IInd and IIIrd Corps having respectively (for instance) 11, 7 and 7 divisions. I'd then be able to quickly create various battle plans assigning my 3 corps to different attack or defense vectors, and keep a similar configuration for my next or alternative battleplans. Of course I would still be able to add single divisions to their own command vectors if i need such granularity.
As a plus it would be even better if i could reassign a division from Ist Corp to IInd Corp, which would cause said division to execute the commands IInd Corp was already assigned to.


Even this simple usage, that would take not much more than some UI work, would satisfy many people here.

 

[jju_57]

The CoC wouldn't do nothing as you claim. We have quite clearly elaborated on the various use it could have in game and ties with the existing Battle Planner.

Primarilly just to have a way to organize your armies into subgroups of divisions, and thus being able to assign those subgroups to various battleplans vectors quickly, clearly and efficiently.

Imagine an hypothetical 25 divisions Ist army, led by Rundstedt. I just want to be able to create in that army a few subgroups that i'd call Ist, IInd and IIIrd Corps having respectively (for instance) 11, 7 and 7 divisions. I'd then be able to quickly create various battle plans assigning my 3 corps to different attack or defense vectors, and keep a similar configuration for my next or alternative battleplans. Of course I would still be able to add single divisions to their own command vectors if i need such granularity.
As a plus it would be even better if i could reassign a division from Ist Corp to IInd Corp, which would cause said division to execute the commands IInd Corp was already assigned to.


Even this simple usage, that would take not much more than some UI work, would satisfy many people here.

And as far as I can tell you have that without needing any CoC. Assign the divisions to a leader for what you call corps 1 through 3. My question is what does these guys being liked to Rundstedt do? That is what you never explained.

They have different attack vectors so where Rundstedt attacks with whatever divisions are assigned to him doesn't matter.

And I love how people say things like "would not take much work". How do you know? You don't have access to the code and neither do I.

 

[Mannstien]

My CoC's knocked out a how heck of a lot of micro from my games, if I want to move an army corps, or an entire army alls I have to do is reassign it with one click and not have to worry about it, it's also easier to find them all because I can name the corps, army, groups, etc. Like when Poland is done it's very easy like 2-3 minutes mode me to divide my forces up onto the the western front close to their jumping off points and also reassign corps to the Norwegian and Danish expedition all while keeping a thin army in front of the Reds.

So even if there are no bonus I find it much more realistic and obviously more effeicent for me personally to control my forces.

 

[jju_57]

What many are talking about is not a CoC but instead assigning some divisions into a group. The CoC is the hierarchy of those groups. It appears that the battle planner has the first part covered. So the difference appears just to be the hierarchy between different groups. And in HOI3 that rarely if ever provided much benefit outside of the bonus given to the structure.

 

[Joppos]

And as far as I can tell you have that without needing any CoC. Assign the divisions to a leader for what you call corps 1 through 3. My question is what does these guys being liked to Rundstedt do? That is what you never explained.

The drawbacks of not having those groups connected as a larger group would be that you could not with the click of a button see where all three groups are, especially in relation to each other if on related maneuvers. You would not be able to directly assign orders to them as one 25 division group. Any eventual group-set parameters like halting or advancing would have to be carried out separately. If the three groups were a specially purposed say mobile group, then you would know exactly where to find one of them them by looking at the hierarchy. These arguments can be carried over to even higher layers.

An operation totaling 25 divisions would obviously not need any hierarchy, but imagine having 500 divisions or say 50 independent corps sized groups to keep track of. You don't, and so you use many larger groups to reduce number of separate entities. For those groups you now you miss out on having small tailored groups easily accessible when a plan goes wrong or a new objective is relevant. You would not have any overarching selection indicating what eventual areas or objectives groups should adhere to should you have any such preference.

The current, of course mainly speculated on system does not make anything of what is argued impossible. It does however make a lot of things needlessly difficult, borderline writing things down on paper. Even tying groups up to temporary larger groups, like perhaps related to a battle plan while better, would still make things needlessly difficult as for every new plan you would have to re-create a new hierarchy, as well as requiring several separate battle plans.

 

[Sir Garnet]

What seems most promising about this game is that I don't have to be my own staff officer and (I hope) don't need to write anything on paper, or in notepad, or Excel.

I was assuming that when I draw an army group arrow to Moscow, then my staff (the game) would assign arrows (and relational positioning orders and maybe timetables?) for for the subordinate armies, corps, divisions, air groups, Headquarters and logistics units etc., available for player review and modification. If a division is ordered from one part of the front to the other, I would expect my staff (the game) to automatically (or ask me first) change its controlling formation permanently or temporarily. If I meddled with orders, I would expect the staff to suggest additional orders for approval in furtherance of the changes I made. E.g., stretching the assigned frontage of an army to conform to the movement of others.

Or if the order is "Conquer Greece" the staff can come up with a proposed plan (or two or more) for approval, maybe with a few questions first to clarify the mission.

My staff is (I hope) not as brilliant as I expect to be, but it is a starting point and a crucial resource for those who know the mission they want to achieve but don't know all the mechanics involved.

 

[jdavis86]

What seems most promising about this game is that I don't have to be my own staff officer and (I hope) don't need to write anything on paper, or in notepad, or Excel.

I was assuming that when I draw an army group arrow to Moscow, then my staff (the game) would assign arrows (and relational positioning orders and maybe timetables?) for for the subordinate armies, corps, divisions, air groups, Headquarters and logistics units etc., available for player review and modification. If a division is ordered from one part of the front to the other, I would expect my staff (the game) to automatically (or ask me first) change its controlling formation permanently or temporarily. If I meddled with orders, I would expect the staff to suggest additional orders for approval in furtherance of the changes I made. E.g., stretching the assigned frontage of an army to conform to the movement of others.

Or if the order is "Conquer Greece" the staff can come up with a proposed plan (or two or more) for approval, maybe with a few questions first to clarify the mission.

My staff is (I hope) not as brilliant as I expect to be, but it is a starting point and a crucial resource for those who know the mission they want to achieve but don't know all the mechanics involved.

I like this!

 

[Dalwin]

What seems most promising about this game is that I don't have to be my own staff officer and (I hope) don't need to write anything on paper, or in notepad, or Excel.

I was assuming that when I draw an army group arrow to Moscow, then my staff (the game) would assign arrows (and relational positioning orders and maybe timetables?) for for the subordinate armies, corps, divisions, air groups, Headquarters and logistics units etc., available for player review and modification. If a division is ordered from one part of the front to the other, I would expect my staff (the game) to automatically (or ask me first) change its controlling formation permanently or temporarily. If I meddled with orders, I would expect the staff to suggest additional orders for approval in furtherance of the changes I made. E.g., stretching the assigned frontage of an army to conform to the movement of others.

Or if the order is "Conquer Greece" the staff can come up with a proposed plan (or two or more) for approval, maybe with a few questions first to clarify the mission.

My staff is (I hope) not as brilliant as I expect to be, but it is a starting point and a crucial resource for those who know the mission they want to achieve but don't know all the mechanics involved.

I don't like this concept at all. You'd essentially end up with the game playing itself. Some simplification from earlier versions is fine, but draw one big arrow from Poland to Moscow and have the system fill in the details? No thanks.

 

[Olfert Fischer]

I don't like this concept at all. You'd essentially end up with the game playing itself. Some simplification from earlier versions is fine, but draw one big arrow from Poland to Moscow and have the system fill in the details? No thanks.

Again I agree with you completely - what a boring game that would be.

 

[Darkath]

What many are talking about is not a CoC but instead assigning some divisions into a group. The CoC is the hierarchy of those groups. It appears that the battle planner has the first part covered. So the difference appears just to be the hierarchy between different groups. And in HOI3 that rarely if ever provided much benefit outside of the bonus given to the structure.

The groups defined in the battle plan, are not persistant ( from what we could see in the demo, the group exist only for one arrow). Ie if you draw a new battle plan, or even redraw an existing plan, or a follow-up order you have to reselect those groups.

As battle plans are supposed to be a central feature of the game and that I assume we are supposed to spend quite a lot of time with them, this could get very tiresome fast;

I don't see why you are so bend up on trying to demonstrate that our request is illegitimate really.


PS: what I and others are suggesting is effectively a COC because those groups would existing within a larger group that is led by an officer. Ie a 25 division army with a leader divided in 3 subgroups with no leaders.
Overarching hierarchy (for instance assigning two 25 division armies and one 10 division army to OKH (and other armies to OKW) could also be convenient once the war scales up in size, so that you can keep track of your many different armies on the map.

 

[George Parr]

I don't like this concept at all. You'd essentially end up with the game playing itself. Some simplification from earlier versions is fine, but draw one big arrow from Poland to Moscow and have the system fill in the details? No thanks.

I really doubt that the developers would have much interest in such a game either, considering their stance was that the AI should do less, not do everything by itself. I'm paraphrasing a bit here, but the guideline was something like 'if you need to put it on AI-control, it probably shouldn't be in the game'. The battle planner seems to exist so you can make a plan and have the units you choose for it execute said plan, not to have the player do pretty much nothing with the AI having to fill in the extremely big gaps in the plan.

Having the player just give a general direction where his army should head to, with the AI having to do all the finer work, would require a drastically better and far more complext AI than has existed in the past and remove any effort on part of the player. While I guess that the AI has been improved, it certainly would make little sense to go with 'the AI was too stupid to get all things done in HoI3, lets add plenty of tasks on top of that for HoI4 and hope for the best!'.

 

[No idea]

What many are talking about is not a CoC but instead assigning some divisions into a group. The CoC is the hierarchy of those groups. It appears that the battle planner has the first part covered. So the difference appears just to be the hierarchy between different groups. And in HOI3 that rarely if ever provided much benefit outside of the bonus given to the structure.

Once you set your oob, it saved a lot of micro.

On any case both sides on this argument are not so far. I think if we could make sub divisions in a given group that would make people more or less happy. I guess that cant be too difficult to make, but i have no idea if the ai will be able to deal with it. Of course, if you dont want sub divisions, you dont have why to make them. It would be optional.

 

[Darkath]

Once you set your oob, it saved a lot of micro.

On any case both sides on this argument are not so far. I think if we could make sub divisions in a given group that would make people more or less happy. I guess that cant be too difficult to make, but i have no idea if the ai will be able to deal with it. Of course, if you dont want sub divisions, you dont have why to make them. It would be optional.

The AI wouldn't need to use it because it's irrelevant to how an AI function.

Just as the AI doesn't use Army templates in EU4 because it doesn't need to.

 

[No idea]

The AI wouldn't need to use it because it's irrelevant to how an AI function.

Just as the AI doesn't use Army templates in EU4 because it doesn't need to.

I meant the ai for battleplans. Because it will be the ai the one that will develope our plans, and i dont know if it will be able to work with subdivisions without "shattering" them (making one part of our corps go in a different way than the one projected because that corps belongs to the same army as the one assigned to that way)

 

[safe-keeper]

What seems most promising about this game is that I don't have to be my own staff officer and (I hope) don't need to write anything on paper, or in notepad, or Excel.

I was assuming that when I draw an army group arrow to Moscow, then my staff (the game) would assign arrows (and relational positioning orders and maybe timetables?) for for the subordinate armies, corps, divisions, air groups, Headquarters and logistics units etc., available for player review and modification. If a division is ordered from one part of the front to the other, I would expect my staff (the game) to automatically (or ask me first) change its controlling formation permanently or temporarily. If I meddled with orders, I would expect the staff to suggest additional orders for approval in furtherance of the changes I made. E.g., stretching the assigned frontage of an army to conform to the movement of others.

Or if the order is "Conquer Greece" the staff can come up with a proposed plan (or two or more) for approval, maybe with a few questions first to clarify the mission.

My staff is (I hope) not as brilliant as I expect to be, but it is a starting point and a crucial resource for those who know the mission they want to achieve but don't know all the mechanics involved.

If this was how it worked in HOI3, I might actually hand over control to the AI sometimes. You give the AI an objective, and then you talk with your officers all the way from start to finish, approving and rejecting operations and making your own when you feel you need to, reacting to new situations that come up.

I don't like this concept at all. You'd essentially end up with the game playing itself. Some simplification from earlier versions is fine, but draw one big arrow from Poland to Moscow and have the system fill in the details? No thanks.

It would be a massive improvement from HOI3, where AI control was indeed about giving the forces an objective and then watch the game play itself (except perhaps from very superficial things like drawing theatres and deciding if an army was blitzing, attacking normally or defending).

 

[Wolfhead]

Give us a hierarchical system of persistent groupings of divisions for ease of selection. Give us a window to organize these persistent groupings, and allow us to give historical names to these persistent groupings. The hierarchical system of persistent groupings would not dispense bonuses and would only aid in unit selection. It could be completely ignored by the AI or the player without suffering any penalty or losing any advantage -- other than the advantage of being organized. A player could use it to the extent he wants. He could divide his divisions into corps, armies, army groups and theaters, or he could just use army sized groups, or no groups at all. Again the only advantage to using the system would be the advantage inherent with being organized -- being able to quickly find and select the particular units that you are looking for. We would not have HQ's on the map, just divisions. Hot keys could be assigned to each grouping for instantaneous selection. It would be an essential tool in multiplayer. The organization window would be whatever the player wanted to make of it. For those who want immersion, full historical command structures could be built with historical names, etc. For multiplayers it would be where you assigned hotkeys to your breakthrough divisions, and your exploitation divisions, and your special forces for immediate selection. For noobs, it could be completely ignored until they discovered the benefits of being organized. It would fit nicely with the proposed battle plan system as you could use those persistent groupings to quickly and easily assign divisions to a general. Assign an army group to one general to defend the Rhine. Assign a corps to another to punch through at Sedan. Assign an army to a third to exploit. Put on top of this Secret Master's suggestion of a theater staff of officers that give various bonuses based upon their particular skills, and I think you have a system that will not be a drag on game play, but will actually aid game play, and at the same time provide the game with detail, depth and immersion.

+1

 

[EU3NOOB]

I will maintain my faith in PDS... until they fail me.

Then I'll force choke them. Podcat first.


By the way Podcat, how goes the construction of our Death Star? If it is not on schedule the Fuhrer will be most displeased...

 

[No idea]

A CoC without it doing anything is a waste. HOI3's CoC was very close to a waste because it really didn't do much. Honestly outside of possible immersion what did it do?
?

It saves a lot of micro once you have set your coc. With just two clicks you could move lots of divisions.

On top of that, the battleplaner is perfect for a coc, as it seems the units will follow the different arrows you draw, it is just natural that you assign x army to a given arrow and, later, when that arrow bifurcates you assing x army corps to left arrow and y army corps to right arrow. I hope i have explained myself.

 

[albso437]

It saves a lot of micro once you have set your coc. With just two clicks you could move lots of divisions.

On top of that, the battleplaner is perfect for a coc, as it seems the units will follow the different arrows you draw, it is just natural that you assign x army to a given arrow and, later, when that arrow bifurcates you assing x army corps to left arrow and y army corps to right arrow. I hope i have explained myself.

Yes, but that would require that the AI keeps the different corps together.
If you give an Army the order to take X, the AI would likely not care about the corps, but rather use the individual divisions as the AI see fit.
Then your corps are spread and the divisions mixed all over the place, and it could be difficult to withdraw one or two corps, as the divisions are geographically spread and some may even have "front duty". In the later case the withdrawal of the corp couls cause "holes" in the front.

So - the AI must understand the concept of corps, keep them together, etc.
It would be awesome if it could, but I don't think that this is the way the AI in HOI4 will work at all.