Quill18 vid: "War is looking good"

[fabius]

What I thought would be a nice feature is that players could make Battle Plans for a country and save them to a file. Things like 'The Defense of Russia 01', 'What France Should have done!' or 'Japan's Seaborne invasion of Southern China'. These would then be loaded into the game, and they would give options for the AI. As in Soviet AI (not a player playing the Soviet Union) would check the situation (threat levels on which border, size of his army, other things) and look at it's filed Battle Plans for ones matching the situation and say it has 5 plans that fit the situation and randomly (some plans may have a higher % than others) picks one. When the objective is achieved or the situation fails apart the AI goes back and looks for the best plan(s) that match the current needs and picks one. This way you have Humans making the plans and with the random chance the player doesn't know which one. If the AI has 10 different plans for the defense of France, the player does know which one the AI picked.

As time goes on players post their plans for other to download to their game so eventually there would be many plans covering many different situations. At this point I am think this could be a DLC (not in the game as released). What do you all think?

This!!! You read my mind. Now we have seen more of the battle planner it deserves its own thread again.

Looks to me like we'll get a basic planner that has SO much potential for expanding on.

1. Definitely the AI needs a stock of alternatives to keep the player on our toes.

2. Sharing and saving them across games would be great.


Other, off the top off my head:

3. Set % reserves for that plan.
4. Add priority objectives for AI. ie the objective line is drawn- but tell the AI a province is the priority objective, and x province secondary. third ect.
5. Some options could be related to Doctrine tech. research blitz krieg now we can have specific AI planner to draw and encirclement plan.
6. Need to be able to tell subordinate Allies what to do. Need, NEED, NEEDED !!!

 

[Art1985]

I really hope they will teach AI to generate new plan without any plans that is prepared for him. To many situations can happen in the game and AI have to be prepared for this and this is impossible to set all battle plans for any situations that can and will happen in the game.
And I think that Air Force also needs to be involved in battle plans, so that the players can set air support for his ground forces in needed places or main attack directions, or set air forces only for this army group.
For example, I want to set in plan that when my ground forces will get to Paris, my cas should concentrate in this region automatically. And I want to set that my tactical bombers would bomb around Paris before that, and stop doing this when cas starts their job.

 

[fabius]

I really hope they will teach AI to generate new plan without any plans that is prepared for him. To many situations can happen in the game and AI have to be prepared for this and this is impossible to set all battle plans for any situations that can and will happen in the game.
.

Ideal world yes. But you know real AI is not with us yet, and most of us will be running this on our desktops. Maybe they can get the AI to generate plans, but more likely intricate ones will need pre scripting.

 

[Art1985]

Ideal world yes. But you know real AI is not with us yet, and most of us will be running this on our desktops. Maybe they can get the AI to generate plans, but more likely intricate ones will need pre scripting.

Script for logic yes, but I don't want to see fully prepared battle plans for the AI,even if it will have 10 plans for invading Poland, or France. I want to see AI that can react to situations that can be in front.
And would be great if some of battle AI scripts would be opened for the mod community.

 

[fabius]

Script for logic yes, but I don't want to see fully prepared battle plans for the AI,even if it will have 10 plans for invading Poland, or France. I want to see AI that can react to situations that can be in front.
And would be great if some of battle AI scripts would be opened for the mod community.

That's just it, cut down the work that an AI would need to do by it having several plans for the most likely situations- that are in front of it.

 

[Gamer_1745]

I don't know if it can be done with a DLC. And I am not suggesting no other combat AI, but if an AI can find a plan that has tags that fit the current conditions (numbers of divisions available, control of which provinces currently, others) then it will use it and if there is more than one it will pick a weighted one randomly (so players won't know which one). Also this may not be to everyone taste and should be a DLC so no one needs to use it.

Should I start a new thread and include what has been said already?

 

[fabius]

I don't know if it can be done with a DLC. And I am not suggesting no other combat AI, but if an AI can find a plan that has tags that fit the current conditions (numbers of divisions available, control of which provinces currently, others) then it will use it and if there is more than one it will pick a weighted one randomly (so players won't know which one). Also this may not be to everyone taste and should be a DLC so no one needs to use it.

Should I start a new thread and include what has been said already?

Im not mod marerial; but my opinion is that Battle Planner is central to the new stuff in HoI4, and worth its own updated chat now we have seen it more

 

[Art1985]

I don't know if it can be done with a DLC. And I am not suggesting no other combat AI, but if an AI can find a plan that has tags that fit the current conditions (numbers of divisions available, control of which provinces currently, others) then it will use it and if there is more than one it will pick a weighted one randomly (so players won't know which one). Also this may not be to everyone taste and should be a DLC so no one needs to use it.

Should I start a new thread and include what has been said already?

To many situations can be in the game, nobody can predict what will happen. To much plans needed for this. And if in game will be unpredicted situation, then we will get weird AI behavior or total AI freeze.
And if AI will have only one plan for every situation then human player will use it against AI.
AI have to make his own plans for every situation based on enemy units in every enemy province, AI have to understand what obstacles he will meet in his paths (rivers, fortifications).
Sorry for my poor english. It is hard for me to formulate my thoughts in english, but I hope you understood what I mean.

 

[Qatlas]

Well is there anything on the video that talks about how occupation and partisans work?

No, i just notice too much occupation points for that battle. That is my opinion nothing more. Maybe devs consider this.

 

[merlin2199]

Any way to disable the day/night cycle? Drives me insane.

 

[Mauricio-M]

The game looks great. With this vídeo I fill my expectations.

Excellent

 

[Midden]

did you notice the speed the game was set to it was either speed 3 or 4 so troops will move quick at that game speed

Its not a game speed setting problem, but how far the troops could be moved per game day. As Quill seemed to move all his divisions from the middle of Yugoslavia to Italian / French border and it seemed to take only 4 game days, that is too fast for my taste. Given that Yugoslavia had just been war ravaged, there seemed to be no requirement to have some troops remain to sort out control of the newly captured territory.

If we can disengage all our armies from a campaign and send them all to another front hundreds of miles away in 4 days, to me that means WWII will be over too fast.

It also implies to me that:
a) the supply logistics system is flawed? ... unlimited petrol?.... the amount of road /rail capacity required to have all your divisions on the move and over that distance should be a severe strain on your logistics.
b) that the movement rate of the troops also seems to be set too high.
c) that this is like playing risk, you can move your whole doom stacks from one region to another as a conquered territory needs no occupation garrison?

 

[Holy.Death]

Or you could just do it yourself, an odd idea in a game but can be quite effective.

You can.

Best of luck with that I suspect you will be rolling up your sleeves a lot then because judging from thee video unless you spend your time creating a detailed plan for your AI its going to struggle even if it greatly out numbers the enemy AI.

I don't get you guys. You say battle plans take control from player as he only has to watch the game play itself out. Then you say that it'll take a lot of work making a good battle plan... Basically damned if you do, damned if you don't. I think it won't be as attention-heavy as moving all units manually, day after day. And if it will allow me to get roughly same results - my men doing what I want them to do - then I'll take it. I don't see it as a good thing if I am stuck at the base level (division level - because that's how you control units manually) in a game that's about strategical warfare.

 

[mdw1985]

What i'm thinking about is the following: i guess quill, arumba and so on still have the steam keys for the game. Would they be allowed to do a let's play with that on youtube?

 

[Denkt]

I would guess no.

 

[paranoidsteve]

On re-watching the vid i noticed something in the division planner that caused me to pause it and ponder. His Italian infantry divisions have a brigade of 6 towed artillery pieces . Their icon has a little + sign in it. Does this allow us to change the numbers of guns in that brigade?

 

[Denkt]

Probably as the developers have said something about support brigades of varying sizes.

 

[Jakalak]

What i'm thinking about is the following: i guess quill, arumba and so on still have the steam keys for the game. Would they be allowed to do a let's play with that on youtube?

Have to agree with Denkt, but that would be pretty sweet!

I don't know, I imagine that if youtubers were allowed to freely show footage of the game, quill would have incorporated some footage that wasn't of the multiplayer session.

 

[WolfsRainESP]

After I recover from the shock I am sure I will have more to see but this is General Quills situation at one point.

Bottom line if I was facing this level of resistance by Yugoslavia in HOI III I would be in Belgrade.


Quill Should either fire himself or his Divisional commanders.

He also left unprotected France's border. I think paradox just put a bunch of idiots (with all respect to them) to play the alpha, so that they do not know where to crash the game or complain about ahistorical things. If they invited people who played HOI before, they may had problems. Quill just used the "Commander Paint" to see what happens, but, if i was him i would have micromanaged that easy Italo-Yugoslavian War... Just my thoughts.

 

[Deathmachinept]

Yeah, this bugs me, too. I love the battleplan feature as a simple "I don't want to micro the frontline" feature, something that makes it easier for new people or people who don't want to focus on that to wage a war. Perhaps not that effectively, since you let the AI handle it and the player might make smarter decisions than the AI.

But it bugs me that units are more efficient when fighting in a battleplan. It bugs me a lot. I don't want to suffer a disadvantage because I choose to focus on the war waging part of the game and micro that. :I

Well I disagree I always thought ordering attacks 1 hour before was very unrealistic and always bugged me and even with the planned attack there was very few incentives to do so.
This feature actually makes a lot of sense plus it opens for more devastating tactics to foil or features to tip off attack attempts or planned attacks.