Please Paradox, bring back divisional level Commanders!

[Denkt]

HOI4 don't have uber generals. All generals seems to be able to reach the maximum skill of 5 and get 5 traits. You can recruit new generals for a political point cost. These start at skill 1 and no traits but they can develop to become skill 5 with 5 traits generals.

Rommel is maybe skill 3 with one trait at the start, hardly the best general but can develop if you use him and he well get the traits he need the most.

 

[keynes2.0]

I am talking game effect, why not just put the whole Army under Rommel? how would other leaders under him help? In game terms?

Well there is a lot of ways you could do it but I think my suggestion would be that subordinates give their leadership bonus to a small number of divisions (perhaps 3) but it's spread out over the whole front. So suppose you have Kesselring as commander in chief of 10 divisions in North Africa and you give him Rommel as a subordinate. Rommel's commander bonus as a subordinate would be 3/10ths of what it would be if he was commander in chief.

 

[prettycows]

Yes in hoi3 playing on the eastern front is very tedious when it comes to assigning divisional commanders. But they still represent how talented and experienced a nation's leaders are, which is much more diverse than can be represented with a single general. The USSR for example at the beginning of Barbarossa had mostly new commanders due to the Great Purge, but still had some skilled and even somewhat experienced ones at its disposal; and just these may be enough to win some crucial battle.

However they did not hand pick leaders for every single division out of hundreds so it would make sense for the system to be randomized, but still allowing for certain leaders to be put at important sectors if needed.

 

[Gamer_1745]

Rommel is maybe skill 3 with one trait at the start,

I am so glad you know this or is the 'maybe' a sign you are guessing?

And another unrelated question, knowing generals in HOI IV are corpe level & above, when should he show up in the game for the first time? I am interested in what you & others think the range of choice a player should have and how much history should restrict you (this is important (at least to me)).

In 1941 to take command of the Afrika Korps? In 1940 when he commanded a Panzer Division in France? or at start in 1936 when he was just a colonel and had not yet published his book (it was publish in 1937)? How much freedom should a player have in things like this?

 

[Dr. Frog]

you & others think the range of choice a player should have and how much history should restrict you

I want it to be a historically based sandbox. In the case of Rommel, I'm not sure how the leadership system even works in game; I know you 'buy' military commanders with political power, but I'm not sure when you can buy what commanders (they're not all available at the same time I don't think). Anyway...
I'd be fine if, in the case of Rommel, he's recruitable throughout the game, any time; I don't like railroading, so killing him off would disappoint me. Introducing him at a later date than 1936 start might be okay.

 

[sandman2575]

Divisional commanders at the *scale* HOI depicts are nonsensical. I'm delighted HOI4 is getting rid of them. They were just massive clutter in HoI3.

Corps commanders on the other hand -- this is where I'm going to most keenly feel the lack of the OOB...

I don't have a good sense of how many generals are in the 'pools' for the major powers. But I very much hope there will not be a shortage of Lieutenants General (3 star, i.e. Corps commanders) -- I want to be able to group 2-4 divisions and label it a "Corps" even if they won't be attached to armies in any meaningful sense, given the removal of the OOB.

Honestly, if we just get mostly field marshals.... that is going to suck. All the von Leebs and Lists and von Bocks were not nearly as decisive as the army and corps commanders. Field Marshal is essentially an administrative role -- and all the genuinely great commanders that were FMs in WW2 got promoted to that rank in the course of the war because they proved amazing tacticians in the field. Hell, Rommel was still a divisional commander during the invasion of France.

 

[t6.28]

I'd be OK with having command structure and assigning leaders to each division, if you could have the AI do it for you. But manually assigning all that seems very annoying.
Back in Hearts of Iron III, I remember just attaching everything to random things (so they don't show up in my outliner) and then wondering, why my tank division is attached to the air force HQ.

Maybe they could make doing that easier, by just allowing you to select a bunch of divisions and the hit a button to just automatically create a command structure for them.

 

[sunzoner]

I'd be OK with having command structure and assigning leaders to each division, if you could have the AI do it for you. But manually assigning all that seems very annoying.
Back in Hearts of Iron III, I remember just attaching everything to random things (so they don't show up in my outliner) and then wondering, why my tank division is attached to the air force HQ.

Maybe they could make doing that easier, by just allowing you to select a bunch of divisions and the hit a button to just automatically create a command structure for them.

Agree that some sort of auto assignment is needed. Users can change the assignment if they have a compulsive need to.

Plus, the battle plan can still be on a front/group basis.

 

[Gamer_1745]

Thank You @Dr. Frog

Your voice has been heard, I guess no one else wanted to be heard on the issue!

 

[KalZakath]

Yes, I am pushing the point. I am not talking about the game as shown. One of my points is that if good generals are to really mean something there needs to not be enough of them. You need to make the choice of were to put the good generals & were the bad. The designers have stated they want this game to be about choices.

A: Yes as shown in the WWWs you can't have more than one front for a General, but if you could then you would need only one.

B:What trait shouldn't Rommel have? He was the best mountain commander in WW II, many think the best Panzer General, best Desert leader, over seer of the the Atlantik Wall(defensive general). So one super general with all traits.

C: At this time I will not comment on the details of what you can plan.

A) Only one would mean it would be a FM - if you have more than 24 divs. there. The bonuses you'd get from it would therefore be the FM ones - logistics, things like that. A General is for 24 units max, and would not have the logistics as a bonus, but would have the things like Fortress-buster, Urban Warfare, Mountaineer kind of bonuses they'd impart to their troops. Therefore, you can either have the FM traits OR the General traits. No leader will have both, unless they changed this very recently.

B) Rommel's traits as a general disappear completely when you make him a FM. Then he'll start getting the FM ones. So if you make him FM - he won't be a desert leader, Panzer General, etc. Instead, he'll be a bureaucrat FM - dealing with logistics and the other higher function things that the FM bonuses give.

I have no problems having a scarcity of generals. But if you're going to have different traits for them at different levels, then that begs for a command structure where you can deal with a large front on both levels. Not looking for 'divisional' commanders - not even corps commanders in most cases. What we have now available are almost Theater-level commanders and corps commanders - but the problem is that these cannot work together without watching and micromanangement to make sure that all the 'corps' commanders are doing to make sure that they are actually working with the FM plan that you've drawn up.