Question after watching the WW Wednesday videos

[ramboversion1]

Hi everyone,

I would like someone to Allay my fears after watching the World war Wednesday videos.

It seems to me that a massive element of strategy has gone watching the combat mechanics. It looks like you grab a load of troops and draw a line behind enemy lines and then watch all the action unfold like a spectator. I hope someone can throw a different viewpoint my way to bring the excitement back for this element of the game.

I don't mean to be negative. The Devs are clearly working hard on the title but as a big fan of HOI 3 Black Ice and the immersion of the combat I can't help but point this out.

Hope I'm wrong on this!

Thanks in advance

 

[potski]

You can still micro-manage your Divs.

 

[Syge]

At first it might look like it but when you start to think about it differently you start to see some nice details about it. For example, I could create 1. Army 2. Army and 3. Army to invade Soviet Union. 3. mission is to battle on a long line as it is the biggest to draw attention all along the line and distract the enemy while mine 1. and 2. are assigned to smaller parts of the line to launch pincer movements with newly drawn lines while the third still continues its own plan and after completion I draw another line somewhere on my line where the 3. still fights for longer goal somewhere far away to create another move.

When these plans fail, and will because all planned will fail, I can micromanage the divisions in all the armies to cope with the new situation

hope this helped a bit

 

[ramboversion1]

At first it might look like it but when you start to think about it differently you start to see some nice details about it. For example, I could create 1. Army 2. Army and 3. Army to invade Soviet Union. 3. mission is to battle on a long line as it is the biggest to draw attention all along the line and distract the enemy while mine 1. and 2. are assigned to smaller parts of the line to launch pincer movements with newly drawn lines while the third still continues its own plan and after completion I draw another line somewhere on my line where the 3. still fights for longer goal somewhere far away to create another move.

When these plans fail, and will because all planned will fail, I can micromanage the divisions in all the armies to cope with the new situation

hope this helped a bit

Hi Syge,

Nice post. That makes sense. Didn't mean to appear negative I am very much looking forward to the game.

That's put a different spin on it for sure. Thanks for your input. Fear allayed!

 

[Syge]

Good that I could be of assistance

HOI IV will be awesome

 

[Victor Cortez]

Take the WWW videos for what they are: an unplanned showcase of the game. I mean, Germany attacked the Maginot Line! Doesn't seem (and was not meant to be) a display of sound planning and tactics.
If the German players had played their cards more efficiently, they would have taken France with much less casualties and would have mantained a presence (at least) in North Africa. Instead they got in trouble in Sweden, attacked the SU in winter (!) and are not threatening the British isles at all.

 

[Starisc]

I believe it is too early to draw such a drastic conclusion based on a fast-paced multiplayer dev match. Here are my thoughts about it:

1) In my view the purpose of this let's play is too demonstrate the width of the game - not the depth. From twitch comments you can see that a lot of people are eager to get down to the details (I stopped the video myself a few times as well) but the devs want to show the whole game and not only the deepest levels of battle mechanics. Furthermore, neither player has that much time to micromanage everything down to a single division. You saw Daniel microing quite a bit I would say, he just didn't have his tank divisions properly concentrated to go for those large encirclements we all love.

2) A working AI following such battle lines is actually a natural addition to a grand strategy game such as HOI4. If you want to simulate the true scale of a world war with an approximately correct number of divisions for a country like Germany, then offering players the tools to manage this complexity better is a necessity for a modern game. If these tools do a well enough job, it takes off the pressure for players to micro everything like in HOI3, where you can spent hours without ever unpausing the game. Forcing players into time-consuming micro because it is the optimal choice is bad design imo and makes the game worse, not better. I applaud these efforts to give players solid alternatives.

3) Even if these tools do work well - and I wish the devs the best of luck for this - it does not exclude micro-managing battles as a valid choice for players. Microing will most likely still be better to a degree, but it is not force-fed to all those, who enjoy the more macro aspects of a game like diplomacy, resource management etc. Don't worry, they know how we tick and will not take away our satisfaction in a well executed tactical engagement.

 

[jodirola]

what I saw is the AI still doing the same as hoi3 bad AI

 

[ramboversion1]

Thanks for your responses guys.

What I expect to see in a showcase demo of the game is the Devs showing off the game to create more hype for the release.

I just couldn't get my head around the display of the combat mechanics. The videos haven't done that part of the game justice for me. For me the pre war build up and planning is a major part of the HOI series as the game only spans a short length of time. It just looked like it was a grab a load of units and draw a line job.

I needed another viewpoint on it is all and Syge provided exactly that. I guess I was letting the negativity creep in which clouded my imagination on what I could do with it. Which is why I came to the forums to get the reassurance I seek.

Roll on the release date.

 

[Amur_Tiger]

I'm not sure it's gone and certainly the game still supports it but we'd have to wait for more detailed plans to be laid out. Recall that a bit part of how battleplan-powered tactics were supposed to work was with multi-stage plans, now this might not be working as intended? ( I forget if we saw this with some of the earlier German attacks on Poland/France ) But my sense is that the players just didn't bother to set something like that up.

I would really like to see how well the AI handles attacking along a narrow part of the front, would the AI concentrate mobile forces correctly and draw down the rest of the line?

 

[comander455]

Hi guys I too have been watching the World war Wednesday videos. but I cant get over how the UK player is still looking for oil when the uk is siting on some lagers oil supplies from the Mideast and some from her Fareast holdings should not the UK player be convoying materials he need from the empire first before going on the open market . All so would not the UK be on par with Germany when it comes to the industrial base foot for foot for weapons .

 

[Syge]

Hi guys I too have been watching the World war Wednesday videos. but I cant get over how the UK player is still looking for oil when the uk is siting on some lagers oil supplies from the Mideast and some from her Fareast holdings should not the UK player be convoying materials he need from the empire first before going on the open market . All so would not the UK be on par with Germany when it comes to the industrial base foot for foot for weapons .

in 1939 oil have had been founded earlier in the 1930s in Kuwait and Saudi-Arabia and first oil wells had just been fired up and many of middle eastern and North African countries would not export until the 1950s cause nobody know there would be so much of it. Main oil exporters that time were Romania, Soviet Union and the USA I believe.

 

[potski]

Partly true. Libya for instance never even started drilling for oil until the 1950s. But Iraq and Iran were producing lots of oil and the rights were owned by BP (at that time called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company). The largest oil refinery in the world in 1938 was at Abadan. There was also a long pipeline from Iraq west through Syria and Palestine IIRC to the Mediterranean.

The company had their own fleet of tankers and in 1939 all 93 of them were chartered by the UK government to carry supplies to the armed forces. 42 of them were sunk, but most were replaced by new ships built during the war.