Pincer Maneuver?

[GPounda]

Good morning;

Using the battle plan tools, how do I get an effective pincer Maneuver?

Can i do it under a field Marshall or do I need two generals and plan each side separately?

 

[Opanashc]

You can create 2 breakthrough plans, and assign certain number of divisions to each, within one army.

 

[Alex_brunius]

Here are some examples:

http://www.hoi4wiki.com/Armored_Spearheads

 

[Praetori]

Good examples linked by Alex above. There are some other detailed stuff that you can do with tiered attacks.
Essentially the spearhead battleplan command that was added as DLC is possible without the DLC. If you make multiple attack-arrows after one another one province deep (in steps, don't forget to use TAB in order to attack the arrows to the correct "line") you can get very precise movement in an automated way (as long as you keep it guarded and check back to adjust the front-lines as units advance, otherwise they'll will get mangled up and widened and the AI will start sending divisions everywhere to try to cover the ever expanding front.

As an example you can select 4 divisions from an army and draw a front-line for these 4. Then make an attack that's 1-2 province deep and 1 wide. Deselect one of the divisions and draw a new attack arrow to the next province in depth (you can potentially skip 2-3 intermediary provinces as long as you don't draw too much width or the divisions will start to spread out), don't forget to use TAB to make sure the attack arrow gets attached to the correct frontline (or they'll start from the baseline with no divisions attached).
Now select two units and repeat. Don't forget to set the aggressiveness stance correctly as you don't want your armor to stop for nothing. Of course this works even better with the pincer command but the front will still "stretch" along with the area conquered by the army in question.

What the plan basically does is creating a corridor and drops off one division for each "step" to maintain it. Once completed the plan is one of the arms in a pincer maneuver.

Of course you can make this a lot more complex with many divisions and from each phase-line you can split the attacking forces up into multiple arrows going in different directions (for example if you have two main thrusts that then diverge to different objectives along the way or for many contingencies and pincers).

 

[GPounda]

Thank you, here is my follow up question. How do I take one General and give him two starting positions like the entry suggests?

 

[Alex_brunius]

Thank you, here is my follow up question. How do I take one General and give him two starting positions like the entry suggests?

You can for example click the "select half" button in the army interface before you allocate the front.

After half divisions have moved away to their location you can select the other half.

 

[Praetori]

Thank you, here is my follow up question. How do I take one General and give him two starting positions like the entry suggests?

As an example. Create an army with 10 divisions. Select one or two of the divisions in the ledger and make a 2 width front-line for those divisions alone. The other divisions that's not been assigned will now have a red exclamation mark in the ledger which shows you they're not assigned to any BP.
You can chose to make more frontlines for each individual division if you so wish or you can assign more divisions to an already existing front-line.

Please be advised though that when the plan is activated there will be issues sooner or later as the AI will stretch and move the front-lines around (ie widen them) to cover the front conquered (or lost) so it needs constant babysitting of adjusting said front. Pressing Ctrl+H to unassign a division is also handy if you want to move a division individually without the AI general throwing it back into the line (which it will do as soon as it has completed whatever order you gave it which can lead to seemingly crazy moves and forces not staying where you manually told them).