Micromanagement...

[Teadrinker]

I like the DLC, but the level of micromanagement is putting me off playing any further games.

A big front in USSR is a nightmare to manage. This pause and rearrange the front every two seconds to adjust the line is just irritating.

 

[jovialmadness]

I like the DLC, but the level of micromanagement is putting me off playing any further games.

A big front in USSR is a nightmare to manage. This pause and rearrange the front every two seconds to adjust the line is just irritating.

Agreed. I just quit my game because of front line issues against Russia. Lines are breaking(not properly filling in) constantly and the Russians bleed through all over the front. There is no way it is playable at the moment. I have never seen anything like this.

 

[Reman]

They really need to make generals under a field marshal re-orient themselves to changing battlefield conditions. As it stands, closing salients or making strategic thrusts can lead to massive overextension or underextension of specific generals.

 

[VKW]

I can also agree that since the patch vast areas of the front line will end up unmanned when a portion of troops extends to far. If I don't pay attention to a certain area for a while, they can easily get encircled.

To be honest I don't mind it because it makes the war more engaging and I'm doing far less sitting around waiting than I would normally and makes for more dynamic warfare, but I don't think that the current system is WAD anecdotally with how often troops are disproportionately deployed.

 

[jovialmadness]

Im cool with a deliberate change making the game more engaging. Heck, if this were intentional I could easily see it as a positive change. What bothers me is I've grown used to my lines atleast sticking together evwn if they would become too overextended for a particular army. Yes that could create problems in of itself but atleast the armies placed divisions on the front! These massive gaps that are happening now require adaptation in a totally different way.

My first thought was this was a blessing since the AI was being so aggresive and making delicious pockets for me to cut off. What I didn't expect was that their frequency would be so high.

 

[fabius]

Just wondering whether you guys are not using the Field Marshal line

 

[Wasted Shampoo]

If you play at speed 1 as real players do you won’t find difficult to manage the frontline

 

[SchwarzKatze]

If you play at speed 1 as real players do you won’t find it difficult to manage the frontline

LOL. Real players pause the game.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Not only are front lines broken, but it is dev-confirmed that you are intentionally penalized for micromanaging yourself despite that.

It's not a coherent stance (the same troops with the same orders to attack the same province receive different bonuses/penalties depending on if you use the broken battle planner or right click), but it's the one we have.

Front lines are untenable. It is an extreme chore to re-update every freaking second because the lines auto-update, even when provinces taken don't actually touch the drawn front line.

• Draw one big front line? Nope, troops will shuffle across dozens of provinces pointlessly, giving up entrenchment and leaving gaps.
• Okay, so maybe draw smaller front lines? Nope, do this and as soon as you take a single province the front lines get extended to overlap, sometimes by more than the province taken, and troops thin out into an incomprehensible mess.
• So give the orders manually so the game doesn't make troops pointlessly go sideways? Nope, the devs actively and intentionally penalize you unless you have a battle plan active, so keep updating those front lines manually after they auto-update into something broken!

Obviously this isn't new to 1.5. Battle planner and garrison have been broken since release (though garrison regressed in 1.5). What is new is that you are now actively penalized for working around the broken battle planner and troops with garrison orders will sometimes do literally nothing.

And yes, to get something even remotely competent on a line like USSR you need to either control manually or CONSTANTLY update plans, made even more frequent by unnecessary auto updates. You can also, with several times the inputs of 1.4, still keep planning bonus decaying at a normal rate despite the arbitrary nonsense nerf manual control. Because we really needed more clicks to do the same thing for some reason :/.

If you play at speed 1 as real players do you won’t find difficult to manage the frontline

This is an interesting post. After mulling over a few options, I go with face-value option:

Making such an assertion is objectively and demonstrably wrong based on the evidence .

 

[$ilent_$trider]

If you play at speed 1 as real players do you won’t find difficult to manage the frontline

Real players were only the ones that actually participated in the engagements that lasted from 1936 to 1948, everyone else are just posers.

Edit: also, real players have curves.

 

[WildMarker]

Edit: also, real players have curves.

And the curves overlap, and we have to rearange them every time we take a province

 

[Admiral Piett]

I have noticed the front line AI leaving a lot of gaps while attacking. Not gaps in the front line orders, but just holes in the front line that they are assigned. It didn't do that before 1.5.

 

[Teadrinker]

Looking at it a little more closely, i think part of the problem is that my troops either don't deploy to the front because of attrition risk or deploy across vast distances to close a potential gap, rather than all shuffling down. So, when the enemy pushes a weak spot, my troops either can't get there fast enough or decide not to engage because they have a yellow flag. And once they've broken the line, the enemy will literally zerg a suicide thread one province wide to get as far as they can before they grind to a halt from attrition.

This means my front line now has a massive bulge that i have to either close faster than the AI cuts off my supply on key areas, or try to envelop the bulge, both of which put my troops into railroad and 0 org compounding the problem.

I guess i'll work out how to deal with it eventually, but it's not been a feature so far.

I'm not complaining that the AI is smarter and the wars harder (this is great!). What i am saying is my battle orders haven't been adjusted to the new AI behaviour. On smaller fronts, unlimited supply, or where i have overwhelming power this is rarely a drama. Against the mass terrain in Russia though it's just a continual fiddle, which isn't much fun.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm not complaining that the AI is smarter and the wars harder (this is great!). What i am saying is my battle orders haven't been adjusted to the new AI behaviour.

It is expressly a problem that the tool given to the player does incredibly stupid movements, while the game actively punishes player controlling forces directly because reasons.

You can't trust the battle planner. You just can't. It will always require more inputs to update decent control than just right clicking around (which you get arbitrarily penalized for doing now) or it expose your army to more casualties and encirclement. It's good for moving/setting up a large number of troops at peace (sometimes) and is a liability in many cases.

 

[Teadrinker]

Right. But the micro gets to be really tedious on a wide front in USSR or USA, which is where I really need a decent battle planner.

Let me add one final point. This ‘improvement’ to the AI will likely turn out to be another Achilles heel. We’ll just start creating guillotine traps for these suicide snake runs the AI seems programmed to do. It’s just going to take a lot longer and be much less of a facsimile for a warfare strategy.

 

[Vampiresoap]

I just stopped caring if the army divisions are over the limit. It's not ideal, but it's better than the alternative...

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I just stopped caring if the army divisions are over the limit. It's not ideal, but it's better than the alternative...

I've fallen to using peace time lines to save time, then deleting for war and using spearhead micro as a DLC replacement for right clicking. Lines can *not* decently follow spearheads so that's out, micro away unfortunately.