Making Defensive-Play more engaging

[Hippob4]

Something I always found to be on the weaker side of the combat in HOI3 was whenever I was on the defensive.

My reason being that I just don't feel like I have any control over the matter. You just either sit their and take your beating until you survive or retreat, you manually retreat, or you send more divisions into the besieged province.

And I was wondering if they could make defensive play more interesting and interactive.

Like, having the ability to manually counter attack whilst you're defending/under attack. There'd be either a button to press or you can right against the attacking force. The upside would be you will possibly inflict more casualties and organization loss on the enemy in a shorter amount of time but the same goes for you (probably more casualties, lower org in shorter amount of time).

I know HOI3 abstracts the Counter Attack aspect into the dice rolling within battles but you only know if there's a counter attack if you are actively reading about the selected battle and when the defender is "Counter Attacking", I never seem to notice thaaat much of a difference between "Attacking" and "Defending" in the battle progression.

I think manual counter attacks could make defensive play more engaging and 'tactical' because before there wasn't much choice other than holding, retreating, or moving more units in to hold whereas the Attacker can choose where and when to attack, how much will be committed or held in reserve, and etc.

Overall, some manual counter attack ability that intensifies/shortens the battle but risk more casualties on your side.

Thoughts or even suggestions on making defending more fun?

 

[RabbidHamster]

I think you could say the same thing about offensive battles really. All you can do is stop the attack, add more units, or just wait for it to resolve (the exact same 4 options as defense, just replace manual retreat with stop the attack).

TBH I don't want that particular level of micro. To have to actually do things for each individual battle would drive me a little wonky, especially with a spread out country like Britain.

I would not mind something along the line of the HOI3 'stances' (I think that's what they were called). Bltiz vs. offenseive vs. defensive I think were the options. That lets you some what influence the pace of battle, and gives you choices of time vs. manpower and equipment. If you could set that by theater, or army that would be fine.

 

[Ryltar]

I don't think it would benefit the game. On a smaller scale or in an turn based game it may make sense but this is no turn based tactics game it's a realtime grand strategy game with the option to pause. HOI is about large scale operations, managing countries and even whole empires.

With what you propose you would probably come to a point where you had to pause the game to issue all orders for your defending divisions, breaking the game flow once and for all.

If you need more options when defending think about what can be done with the game's engine, for example opening up parts of your front just to push the attack on close provinces, enclosing the attacker and finishing him off.

 

[panzerzombie]

Why not adding detailed maps to each province and playing out tactical battles with companies or something for each or selected battles ?

And yes I was totally kidding because something like that would burst everything out of proportion and scope ( who would really want to play something like
that except for nerds like me without a life ).

 

[agentgb]

@Hippob4 you would have liked "March Of The Eagles" you could do a whole bunch of fun stuff to influence the battle, but for the most part, if you were playing any nation but france, your probably only have 2-3 armies. So it was quite managable.


I have my own idea's for how they could do mini maxing for armies in hoi4, that would be an evolved version of the "officer ratio" mechanic, but i think they want to avoid micro and fluff.

 

[sgt.stickybomb]

Well the best defense is offense, so you can always launch an offensive operation, they usually don't expect it.

 

[Wyrm]

In HOI3 you have the option to launch an attack on one of the provinces the enemy attacks you from. This is often a very good way to thwart an attack since if he keeps up the attack he gets a nasy penalty to the units that participate in both battles.

In HOI4 it seems that we can create defenses with the battle-planner, including fall-back lines and other defence-in-depth features.

Launching a manual counter-attack with the already engaged defenders does not seem like a valid tactic that should be controlled at the strategic level. A counter-attack at that level is something that will take place once the enemy attack has been thwarted.

At the strategic level the options available that makes sense for me is to launch a counter-attack using reserves, redirect more units to the defence from neighbouring provinces, retreat, concentrate air-assets to the battle in order to break up the attack with massive aerial bombardment or disrupt the enemy supply lines. All of this will be available to us arm-chair generals in hoi4